


Kitchen Brigade

by Guede



Series: The Sheep Chronicles [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: ALLEGEDLY, Accidental Death, Alive Hale Family, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Cooking, Crack Treated Seriously, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Food Sex, Fractured Fairy Tale, Full Shift Werewolves, Gallows Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Incest, Interspecies Awkwardness, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Polyamory, Rough Sex, Sheep, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Slow Build, Stiles and His Sheep Posse, Werewolf Courting, Werewolf Culture, Young Derek Hale, Young Peter Hale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-06 09:40:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 61,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10331774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: While Stiles’ dad is waiting for Stiles to come back from his sheepherding adventure, he has to deal with terrible bosses, a looming monster threat, and oh, yes, two stowaways in the latest load of potatoes.What?  He’snota cook, never said he was.3/26/17:“Oh, he’s just interested in the fact that Jordan knows how to distill stuff,” Stiles says, catching onto where John’s looking.  He makes a dismissive gesture with one hand and then leans up against the doorway.  “He really isn’t going to secretly trick Jordan into giving up all the moonshine master knowledge and then murder him.  That’s just Peter’s face.”





	1. Chapter 1

John doesn’t know the first damn thing about cooking.

When he and his son took that first step outside the city he’d lived in and protected nearly his whole life, just because he made the mistake of insisting on doing his job, he knew that things were going to change and that they’d have to adapt. He told Stiles, and meant it, that they’d figure it out, and never have to worry about being able to keep their heads up. They’d survive. Exile wasn’t going to take them down.

Well, a couple years on and John’s not dead. As far as he knows—and he _knows_ his son—Stiles isn’t dead either. But, he thinks, staring at the wagonload of rotting potatoes the village headman is trying to shove onto him, he might just be a little envious of his absent son right now. Because he’s tried and tried and he still doesn’t know anything about cooking, but even without knowing anything, he’s got a feeling he’s being screwed over.

“This is what we owe,” the headman insists. He grabs a potato off the wagon and knocks it sharply against the edge of the wagon rail, then turns the new dent in it towards John. “See? Best quality, just out of the ground. Just like your boss wants.”

“They have black spots,” John sighs.

The headman laughs, tosses the potato back onto the wagon, and then swings around to drop his arm across John’s shoulders. “Because they’re black potatoes! Local specialty, very good fried. We’ve eaten them for generations and look at how strong and healthy we are!”

Like any sensible place hosting a deputation from the local garrison, the village has been completely emptied out of any reasonably-young, capable-looking men or women. A couple old men are minding the oxen, while one middle-aged man with a twisted leg mans the local brewery. He limps up just then and offers a round of undrinkably sour beer, which John nevertheless has to drink as the headman goes on to talk about the rough times they’ve been having lately, about how hard it’s been just to keep themselves fed, and oh, yes, about how they’ve still been dutiful subjects despite the fact that the garrison’s about three months behind on paying them for supplies.

John winces into his beer at the last part, since one thing he _has_ managed to get to know, much against his personal inclination, is the quartermaster. “Well, I will report that as soon as I get back,” he says, handing over a receipt for the current wagonload. He and the headman smile at each other and he just catches a flicker of contempt in the other man’s eyes. “Speaking of, these times you sent for help…”

“Oh. Oh, never mind, let’s get you another beer!” the headman says, waving at the other villager. “To the garrison!”

“Right,” John says, and surreptitiously sloshes out half of what he’s still got while the headman’s got his back to him. “But listen, more than one village has said they’ve been attacked by walking corpses. That wouldn’t happen to be your problem too, would it?”

“Walking dead?” the headman repeats. He slews around and sizes John up, and for a second John thinks that he might have just gotten through. But then that oily smile breaks out over the man’s face again. “I don’t know what _they_ were drinking, sir, but right here we do our burials like the law tells us. No, no trouble here, we were just mistaken about it anyway. We don’t want to stir anything up.”

This is going to be a dead end, and on top of that, John’s going to have to take these shitty potatoes and then explain to his idiot-to-willfully-incompetent superiors why they can’t eat non-rotten food, let alone food like back in the capital. Still, he swallows his sigh and sets his shoulders, and tries a last time. “Look, I’ve seen the walking corpses. I know what they do.”

“…then you need _two_ beers,” the headman says, looking him over. A slap to John’s back that gives him an excuse to spill his remaining drink, and then the headman hoists him roughly straight with a hand under the arm. “Trust me, that’ll straighten that eyesight of yours right now. How long you been out here? Different, right? None of your fancy magic here.”

“Yeah,” John says. A potato falls off the wagon and rolls to right in front of them, so soft with rot that the skin splits and the insides are nearly the same color as the smelly, peat-laden mud they’re standing on. “Yeah, it’s different.”

* * *

An hour later, when they finally get out of the village, John gets up onto the wagon seat with the one guard he’s allowed to take with him on these supply-gathering trips. Jordan’s a local. He’s also smart, and somehow, he hasn’t let that embitter him or draw him into corruption, which is probably why _he’s_ the one stuck guarding the exiled asshole. “So I asked around,” Jordan says, his shrug already telling John that it hasn’t done any good. “Wild animal attacks. Also they’ve got a big bonfire circle out back with a couple layers of fresh ashes. And the crops aren’t doing great, but they’re making enough off timber to be paying out-of-towners to come in and do their hunting for them.”

John grimaces, and then again as the wagon rattles over a dip in the road. A potato rolls down onto the seat with him and he grabs it before it falls off, then tosses it to head off the left-hand ox, who’s getting too interested in some of the overgrowth spilling into the road. The ox shies away from the damn thing with such a revolted rush that it nearly bumbles into the right-hand ox.

“Maybe they’re putting all the good potatoes towards that, too,” Jordan says, eyeing John a little. He picks one off the load and starts to lift it towards his face like he means to take a sniff, only before it gets there, his thumb goes right into a rotten spot. Yelping, he hurriedly stuffs the potato back onto the pile and then wipes his hand. “Hiring mercs, that’s not going to go over well with the good commander, but if you’re desperate…can’t blame them.”

“I don’t think Rafael’s going to give a damn,” John mutters. The wagon bumps again and from the sound of it, they lose some more potatoes, but he can’t bring himself to look back. He’s slipping, he’s known that for a while; sheer professional pride _does_ have its limits, as it turns out. “Besides, potatoes and timber aren’t going to buy them that much out here. Be better off clubbing together to send somebody to one of the great libraries and just do some reading.”

Jordan makes a curious noise. “Oh? So how much does a good merc cost, anyway?”

That’s why he’s so willing to go out on the spindly, ever-sinking limb John’s on, John assumes—he’s got some sort of exit plan of his own and it involves extracting as much knowledge as he can out of John. “Depends on what you’re hiring them for.”

A flicker of exasperation crosses Jordan’s face, but he mostly plays along, which is one reason why John doesn’t mind being exploited for information. “All right, then, hunting so-old-they’re-legendary undead creatures,” he prompts.

The other main reason’s that he’s willing to actually talk about revenants, when most of the locals would rather cut off a limb than even acknowledge they know what that term means. Why, John still hasn’t been able to find out, even though he’s made it clear enough that unlike the rest of the garrison leadership, he does in fact believe the things exist, but it’s incredibly frustrating. “Well, that’s kind of a specialist area. So either you’re paying for somebody with that kind of rare knowledge, or you’re paying for somebody who doesn’t know a damn thing but who’s willing to just go after anything,” he tells Jordan.

Jordan nods thoughtfully. “So you’re selling out the village or you’re getting rid of your local idiot on the cheap.”

“Pretty much.” John spots a pothole coming up and drags at the reins, trying to steer the wagon around it, but the oxen stubbornly plod along without minding him.

The resulting jolt sends enough potatoes falling out of the back that, rotten or not, the quartermaster _and_ the head cook, John’s direct superior, are both going to make something of the loss. John weighs things up, then sighs and hands the reins over to Jordan and climbs on down to pick them up. Once he’s done that, he stays walking behind the wagon, keeping an eye on the load.

A growing part of him honestly and sincerely wonders whether resigning and disappearing into the backcountry would be a better idea, seeing as he doubts anyone would object to his resignation. But, he reminds himself, this is where Stiles knows to find him, and when his son comes back from whatever he’s up to, John wants him to have a father waiting for him. Can’t have both of them running around wild.

“What I’m supposed to be saying to him, not to me,” John mutters to himself, eyeing the potatoes. He watches a teetering bunch of them, then takes off his coat and moves around the wagon to use it to catch the ones that fall at the next pothole.

And he thinks he hears something, buried in all the oxen’s grunting, the creak of the badly-oiled wagon, Jordan’s annoyingly jaunty whistling. John frowns and takes a step back, absently bouncing the potatoes in his coat. He walks alongside the wagon for a few more yards, listening, and then snags some more falling tubers. Then he slings them back into the wagon.

“Getting ahead on your mash?” Jordan calls over one shoulder, hearing the squishing.

“About all they’re good for,” John says, and then he notices the wet spots the damn things have left on his coat. He bundles up the fabric and sniffs at one damp patch, then makes a face. Then sighs and throws his coat over the side of the wagon-rail, and just silently gives thanks that the weather is at least decent.

Despite the shitty roads, the dry, firm ground means that they get back to the garrison in good time. Still not early enough for John’s boss, who chews him out for intentionally missing the dinner hustle and then makes him unload all of the potatoes by himself instead of joining the rest of the cooks for staff meal; Jordan gets ordered, unfairly, to report to the walls for the night shift, even though he’s been working the whole day with John.

“Come down after shift and tell you all about the other things I saw, poking around?” Jordan mutters on his way out. “You still going to be around?”

John looks at the potatoes. “Yeah, I’ll be up.”

Looking sympathetic, if also so young a double shift’s barely going to dent his cocky stride, Jordan hisses that he’ll bring something from the guardsmen’s unauthorized still and then heads off. He’s just in time, since John’s boss has come back to announce that since John was such a blind idiot as to accept obviously-spoiled goods, he can also get a head start on cutting out the good parts and setting those aside.

“You know as well as I do that the commander’s picky about his gratin,” Lahey sneers. He stalks around the wagon, kicking over one of the empty bushel-baskets John’s setting out, and then reaches out to grab a potato. Then, as if it’s any kind of show of strength to crush a rotten tuber with one hand, he does that so the juices and bits drop onto John’s shoe. “Next run’s not for a week, so you’d better get _something_ from these.”

“I’ll work on it,” John says. He’d be angry, except he’s noticed that the flask Lahey keeps tucked into his trousers must have sprung a leak because there’s a wet patch spreading down the back of the man’s leg. Or Lahey’s so far into the bottle he doesn’t know when he’s pissing himself anymore.

Either way, it’s enough to keep John nodding and smiling politely till the son of a bitch finally waltzes himself out to go scheme with the other cooks on how to skim off the good stuff from the guardsmen’s rations. John watches the man go with a long, disgusted sigh, kicking dirt over the mashed potato, and then finishes setting up his baskets.

Then he goes over and closes the door so nobody else can get into the courtyard behind the kitchens. He rolls up his sleeves, makes sure his coat’s not anywhere it’s going to get more dirt on it, and takes up a long metal pole they use for stirring up the vats.

“So, do I need to poke you out, or are you coming quietly?” John asks the potatoes.

Nothing. He counts to five and there’s still nothing, and he’s just hefted the pole to shoulder height when there’s a high-pitched, muffled exclamation, followed rapidly by grunts and potatoes rattling off and a small upheaval going on near the end of the wagon. John winces at the splats, thinking too late that he should’ve moved the baskets closer so they’d catch some of those, and then a man and a young girl climb out of the potatoes.

The girl is around Stiles’ age, and clutching a knife with an expression like she both knows how to use it and wants to and is afraid to, while the man’s…probably John’s age, give or take a few years. He’s covered in dirt from the potatoes, but what shows under it is the kind of weatherbeaten leanness that wipes out youth fast but holds old age at bay for a good long while. They’re obviously father and daughter.

“Let us go and we won’t hurt you,” says the girl.

The man hisses at her. It’s not made up of words, but there’s an undulation to the sound that makes John think it’s an understood signal between the two of them. She minds it, but doesn’t necessarily agree, says her expression. And most of the disagreement’s down to worry for her father, says the nervous little tuck of her head when he pushes her behind him. He doesn’t have anything in his hands but he’s got one or two things strapped to his leg, half-hidden in the folds of his baggy pants.

“We just want to cross the pass,” he says quietly. “No trouble, not staying here.”

“Why?” John says. He lowers the metal pole, but angles it so he can use it to block a blow or swing at anything they might throw at him. “I mean, what are you crossing it for?”

The girl frowns, then tightens her grip on the knife. The man’s confused too, but warier, and John’s more than half-sure he’s not going to answer the question when his eyes suddenly flick around them.

The courtyard walls are too high to scale easily, and built of thick stone. Back when the garrison was better-kept, they raised livestock within the walls rather than always going out to get them from the surrounding villages, and this was part of that area. So it’s not easy to get from here back out of the garrison and anybody with any sense would immediately see that.

“Doesn’t suit us out here,” the man abruptly says, returning his gaze to John. His daughter sounds local, but he’s got a faint accent. Not outlands or capital—maybe one of the temples. “And we don’t have the money for the toll. Or for a bribe.”

“Kind of sounds like you’re threatening to kill me to get out,” John notes. He’s a little surprised to see them start, but they harden up into defensive positions fast enough. He keeps a good grip on the pole but starts to back up, watching them watch him. Especially when he steps out of the way of the one doorway. “Well, I’m a cook, tolls are the guard’s job. Though you know it’s a hell of a time to be heading back in, right?”

The girl had wanted to make right for the door, but he’s got the man’s curiosity. “What?” he says. “Why? What happened?”

“Well, Ashe is prime minister now, and he’s got no interest in the provinces. Pulled out all the soldiers all along the roads, so between here and the capital, you’re either taking a bodyguard with you or taking your life in your hands,” John says. He takes another step back, then glances at the knife in the girl’s hands. “But I guess you look like you’re used to that.”

Surprisingly enough, both the girl and the man look upset at the news. “What?” she says. “But—but he can’t do that. What—what about all the—but then who’s going to watch out for—what about—the temples at least—”

“They’re pretty much watching their own lands and that’s it, since Ashe ordered all their tithes go to the capital instead,” John tells them. So they’re not just running from some village trouble—they thought they were running _towards_ something. They don’t look like any of the noble lines, or the major priesthoods, and he might be in exile but he doesn’t think his knowledge there has gotten too dated. “Were you going to see somebody? Look, I’m not going to help you if I don’t like it, but if you want to tell me who, then maybe I can tell you whether they’re still—”

“But this is all that’s guarding the pass?” the girl cries. She’s starting to get loud and her father takes her by the shoulders, though still with his eyes on John. The knife drops and she grabs at her father’s arm. “But then they could overrun it any time! There’s not enough people here to catch them all.”

John…doesn’t think she could be talking about what he thinks she is. It’s too far of a stretch, given all the more normal explanations, like robbers and wild animals. No real nobility out here, at least no one recognized by the capital, but beyond the pass there are communities like the werewolves who effectively are the same thing, and it’s much more likely she’s talking about someone like that. 

“You mean revenants?” he says anyway.

The man had been about to say something comforting to her, but at that the two of them snap around and stare at John, and what do you know, the three of them all were thinking about the same thing. 

Which, since even if she’s got the right accent, she’s no villager, means John’s thoughts about who and what they are just got simplified. “You with a temple?” he guesses. “Which one? The—”

And she’s going to throw the damn knife at him. John cuts off with a half-bitten swear and hikes up the pole, just as the man winces and grabs for his _daughter_ , and then…Lahey’s come back and rattling his key-ring. “Stilinski! Stilinski, I hear voices and if your goddamn little bastard of a son’s back, I want to—”

There’s no time. There’s no place either, unless they dive back into the potatoes, and that’s not going to work, they knocked out so many potatoes they won’t have enough to pull over them again. The man makes an aborted jerk towards the wagon anyway, but he’s barely moved his feet when Lahey just barges in. 

“Stilinski, I…” Lahey stops mid-rant, blinking hard. The first one he sees is the girl, who obviously isn’t Stiles. He steps back, pulling out his flask, and takes a swig from it, and he’s so off-guard that he doesn’t notice nothing’s swishing around in it. “Huh. What the hell is this?”

The man had smartly jerked the girl’s arm down so the knife is hidden behind them, seeing as it’s not just Lahey they’d have to deal with; more voices are coming into this part of the kitchen. But that’s not pure fear in the man’s eyes—there’s a grim determination John recognizes from the days he actually led men, and…John hates himself a little, but he doesn’t want to be party to a slaughter. Lahey might not weigh too much on his conscience, but the other cooks aren’t hostile so much as easily led.

“Replacement dishwashers,” John says. He hears a small noise from the girl, but she mostly keeps it off her face, and the man just looks completely neutral. “Since my son left us short. They were beggars and were following us, and I figured we could use the bodies.”

Lahey lets out that nasty, abrasive laugh of his, but he doesn’t look alarmed anymore. His eyes are shifting around in that way that means he’s calculating whether this is going to affect his skim, and if so, in which direction. “Thinking you can get out of the pig work, huh.”

“Well, it’d leave me more time to go around and try and get better provisions out of people. And Thomas is worried about that on top of the commander’s taste buds,” John points out.

“Isn’t going to get you Parrish to plot behind our backs with any more than you’ve already got him,” Lahey says, but he’s off-handed about it. He honestly doesn’t care who’s in charge so long as they don’t come peeking at his inventory too often, and Quartermaster Thomas has been doing that more as the food quality’s been going down. “I hope you don’t think you’re getting an extra ration out of this. You and your son got your allotments when they booted your high-and-mighty asses down here, and you’ll be damn lucky just to get his back. Picking up a pair of beggars isn’t that big of an accomplishment, city-boy.”

Every time Lahey mentions Stiles, John would like to punch the bottle straight back into the man’s face. But he swallows that down and just shrugs. The man and girl, at least, are playing it completely wooden, so it’s only his temper he has to worry about. “It still means when I’m here, you don’t have to have Cornish help, and when I’m out, that frees him and Long up.”

“True. True. And I appreciate you trying out thinking of the rest of us for once,” Lahey says. He folds his arms across his chest, then glances down at his flask. Rattles it, realizes it’s empty, and the mean look starts coming back into his face. “Well, I won’t report you but this isn’t sticking my neck out for you either. You can have your beggars till somebody notices, and then you’ll be on the carpet all by your lonesome.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything less from you,” John says dryly.

“Well, I’m expecting something in the morning, once Parrish has helped you to some of that liquor those guard bastards won’t give to me,” Lahey adds. He looks at John, takes a half-step around and then looks again, like that rheumy stare’s so much more effective over one shoulder, and then walks back into the kitchen.

John waits a few seconds, then goes up to the door and peeks inside. Lahey’s down at the other end, talking to two of the cooks, but after a second they all move out of the kitchen. The man probably figures he’s got John blackmailed for at least a month of tipple from the guardsmen still; John’s going to have a hell of a time getting out of that, but it does put things off for a while.

“All right, don’t stab me,” John says, turning around. “My rooms are a couple minutes away. You come over, get washed and changed, and get some rest. A trade caravan should come through any day and they should be willing enough to hire hunters, even excommunicated or whatever’s got you running.”

The man and girl stare at him. He stares back for a couple seconds, and then taps the doorway with the pole.

“Or try your own luck and get caught. Just make up your mind because I still need to peel and slice up all those damn potatoes,” John says, letting some of his irritation finally come through.

“We’ll—” the girl starts and then glances at her father, who nods slightly “—try your rooms. Thank—thank you.”

“Yeah, sure, not like they like me anyway,” John sighs. He glances into the kitchen again, then jerks his head. “Come on, then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll admit that I've not watched TW episodes up to Parrish's appearance, and am basing his characterization on clips and fandom wiki pages.
> 
> Rafael...is not Scott's father here, obviously (if you read the [The Shepherd Boy and the Wolves](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9808652/chapters/22025078), that'd be biologically impossible), but let's say he's a spiritual relation to Scott's father.
> 
> Isaac ran away or something, so it's just his dad around.


	2. Chapter 2

At this hour, it’s relatively quiet in the garrison. People are attending to their chores after the evening meal and haven’t yet broken out for what passes for entertainment in this godforsaken dump, so John’s able to sneak the man and girl to his rooms with relative ease. He can’t let them into the bath-house, but he gets two buckets of hot water from the always-simmering vats in the laundry and leaves that with them, along with soap, bread and jerky, and some spare clothes.

“I’ve just got boys’ clothes, but you’re not too far off my son’s height,” John says, handing a set to the girl.

“Thank you,” she says quietly. Her eyes roam the room and then stop on the constellation models Stiles chipped into the plaster; John packed up what little Stiles left so the greedy asses who run the garrison couldn’t take it from him, but he’s just never gotten around to replastering over those, though when someone notices, they’ll dock it from his pay. “Is this…”

“Yeah. Yeah, but he’s…traveling. I know the bed here’s not that roomy, but you can probably use my bed for the night,” John says, turning towards the man. And then sighs, thinking of all those damn potatoes. “I know that’s not any bigger, but I’m not going to need it.”

The man nods and also thanks John. Then the two of them get down to the business of tending to themselves, without any further delay, or even a glance over as John heads out of the room. He’s probably not even going to have to let them out in the morning; if a caravan comes through, they’ll hire themselves out to it and be gone before he has to worry about somebody spotting them who he can’t bribe with contraband liquor.

* * *

The potatoes are a pile of hell.

“I wish I could help, but I’ve got four hours to sleep before they’ve got me up again,” Jordan says, when he stops in to check on John and drop off the moonshine.

“You’re on watch again?” John says. Then he grimaces. “Did Lahey come by?”

Jordan nods, but then puts up his hand. “Yeah, and whatever he’s so smug about having over you, I don’t want to know. You know I’m a better liar when I honestly don’t know what’s going on.”

“I’m not doing anything,” John says after a second.

“I don’t want to know,” Jordan repeats, with a hopeful lift to his teasing that both makes John feel too damn old and too damn much of a failure. The kid keeps thinking John’s some kind of fighter. “Anyway, sounds like maybe we should hold off on the recon debrief, now that Lahey’s got Haigh on my back? I don’t think any of it was…well, any worse than the other things we’ve heard.”

Since whether something is urgent and whether it gets prioritized around here are two completely unrelated things, John hears and agrees. “Get out of here and figure out why your sergeant hates you so much he’s listening to Lahey now,” he says. “But thanks for the—”

“This isn’t me doing anything either,” Jordan says, pointing at the bottle of moonshine, and then he slips away.

John tucks the bottle away between two bushels of cut-up potatoes, and then sits down on an upturned basket. He reaches for a potato, then sits back with a groan. Because he has three more bushels to go through, and because his back hurts and his hands cramped up hours ago and if he didn’t have half-dried starchy juices all over them, he’d know how many cuts the knife’s given him. If the damn things have rot in them, he hopes it’s at least the hallucinatory kind, he catches himself thinking.

He looks up and the man’s standing there, cleaned up and dressed in a spare set of John’s clothes, with a paring knife in one hand and a towel in the other. “That roof over there goes straight to the side your west window opens onto, and the guards aren’t spaced closely enough to spot anyone going over it,” is what the man opens with, as he turns over another basket and then sits down on it. “Doesn’t help with getting out of the garrison, but would cover getting back, not that anyone in the kitchen dorms are sober enough to come looking.”

“And did you stop in to look at them on your way over?” John says, sitting back and looking at the man.

Who shrugs and peels a potato. He’s a lot better at it than John, using quick little flicks of his wrist to send each peeling onto the towel, which he’s laid in front of him. In no time at all, he’s got a neat heap of peelings, compared to the wild scatter around John.

“My name is Chris, and my daughter’s name is Allison,” the man says, picking up another potato. “There was a John Stilinski who was named captain of the palace guard a good—”

“Yeah, that’s me, so I know how long ago that was,” John says.

He sounds cranky, and he regrets it for more reasons besides just not wanting to let a stranger know every sore spot he’s got, but Chris just gives him a brief glance and starts on a _third_ potato. “Why do you know about revenants?” Chris asks. “That’s not part of palace duty. Unless things are worse up there than I thought.”

“Well, you were headed that way till I mentioned Ashe pulling everybody back to the capital,” John says after a second.

Chris slows up on the potatoes for a damn second. Though…it’s not so much because he’s eyeing John, as because he needs to pull over a half-filled bushel so he can start cutting up what he’s peeled into good and rotten pieces. “It’s been generations since anybody cared much about this mountain range, but I didn’t think they were just going to throw away everybody outside the capital. How are they planning to eat? They need the farmland.”

“If I knew that, I don’t think I’d be out here trying to make these edible,” John says, nodding at the potatoes.

“True,” Chris says. He’s still sizing John up—John didn’t miss the hinted menace in him pointing out that he can get into John’s rooms whenever he wants—but he’s starting to look sympathetic about it. 

He also doesn’t talk too much, or push his point when he can just sit there, working through three potatoes to John’s one, and put it on John to make the next move. Not a temple-trained man, although that accent’s still pulling at John’s mind. Former temple forces always wander off into whichever doctrine their old house was pushing about how to balance good and evil, or scour the earth of undesirables, or thwart fate or whatever they cared about.

“So why do you know about revenants?” John asks.

Chris doesn’t pause in peeling. “Because they’re working the trade roads around here.”

John stops peeling and starts to take a breath, and Chris’ eyes flick up to him. “You know,” John starts, and then changes his mind at the last minute. He’s rusty, but he still doesn’t prefer threatening people straight off. “All right, who told you they were called revenants?”

For a moment Chris looks at him, steady and unblinking. Two potatoes go through Chris’ hands and drop as chunks into the basket, and John catches himself twice from glancing down to at least see whether Chris is nicking himself, or whether it’s really going as smoothly as the regular, soft _snick snick_ sounds are making out.

“If we talk about this,” Chris finally says. “Talk about them, what’s going to happen?”

John sucks his breath again, grimacing.

“Anything?” Chris says, his skeptical tone taking its cues from John’s expression. “If they’re not doing anything on the other side of the pass, then…”

“They, meaning the people who live around here,” John says slowly. “They’re lucky there’s even still a garrison up. And look, I believe in revenants, but I’m a _cook_ , and that should tell you something.”

Chris presses his lips together and stops with the potatoes. He doesn’t look happy about what he’s hearing, though if he’s not temple-affiliated…a true merc wouldn’t give a damn about the overall picture as long as someone was still around to pay him, and your average crusading newcomer wouldn’t be so self-possessed. Which doesn’t leave too many possibilities for someone John’s never run across before. 

Then again, John reminds himself, figuring out who people really are is not his job anymore, and neither is trying to protect them from themselves. Honestly, the only thing he should care about is making sure he’s still around when Stiles comes back, and once that happens, making sure he’s prepared to take Stiles and just walk out.

Sure. That’s what he should care about. “Look, just tell me you weren’t going to make things worse,” John sighs, shaking the peelings off his current tuber.

He puts the knife back to the potato and it slips on the slime of the just-peeled portion and slides right into the ball of his thumb. Cursing, John drops the potato. Then curses again and fishes it out of the basket for the _good_ bits, and gives the basket contents a once-over for any blood. And then the basket gets taken away.

“I’m not entirely sure how I could do that anyway, but I wasn’t planning on it,” Chris says, as he moves the basket. “Allison and I aren’t here to mix things up with the guard either.”

“Yeah, well, they’re mixed-up as it is,” John mutters. He sticks his knife in the ground and then presses at the cut on his thumb, forcing blood out till he figures he’s either gotten out any potato slime or he’s got that so deep in his body he’d have to bleed all the way out to get rid of it. He digs out a scrap of cloth and ties up his thumb, and then reaches for the basket.

Chris holds onto it. He looks puzzled as to why John’s even reaching for it, and while John still has his hand out, the man shoves the basket between his knees and then grabs a potato.

“What are you doing?” John asks.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Chris says. He gets halfway done with the potato and then is so puzzled by John that he stops and gives John a helpless little shrug, as if _John’s_ the one who should be changing what he’s doing. “You should pull your knife in towards you, not away. That’s just basic peeling.”

“Well, I said I was a cook. Didn’t say I was any good at it,” John mutters, resisting the urge to rub the embarrassment off his face. He shifts his elbows on his knees, then sighs and leans out for the basket.

Chris shuffles it back between his legs. “I can do this faster than you.”

“Sure,” John says. He looks carefully over Chris’ face, then glances at the potato expertly falling apart in Chris’ hands. “But you’re not supposed to be doing this.”

“You told the head cook I was,” Chris says, tilting his head. Then he checks John. “That was who he was.”

“Yeah. Yeah, and he doesn’t have the authority to give me a couple servants any more than I do. That’s quartermaster level at least,” John points out, even though he’s sure Chris already knew that. Seeing as Chris had nodded in the direction of Lahey’s rooms, even though those are not directly on the way between John’s rooms and here.

Chris does that little shrug again. “So you should watch out for either of them,” he says, and then he twists around on his seat so that he doesn’t have to reach so far to get the remaining potatoes.

He’s also putting his shoulder to John, and sure, it’s not the man’s back, but it’s enough of a statement. And John…finds it strangely amusing for some reason. Considering he’s been taking orders left and right from men he wouldn’t have trusted to empty his waste bucket, and wakes up every day thinking today’s the day he’s just going to punch someone, it’s not really how he’d figure he’d react to some penniless man he’s rescued for no reason but more trouble on his head commandeering his duties.

Tired, John thinks. That’s what he is. He’s been up nearly a full day at this point, and he’s too old to be doing that, and somewhere in the world the one thing in his life he had to get right is running around trying to save them both.

“I’m going to deal with this,” John says. He stays sitting for one more second, then shakes his head and gets to his feet.

“You should wash it out with brine,” Chris says without looking up. “Or vinegar, if you—”

“We have _salt_ ,” John mutters, rolling his eyes, because fine, he’s…going to just let the potatoes go, but that doesn’t mean he’s completely dead.

Chris pauses. Doesn’t look up, but for a moment he looks like he might. Then he nods and rocks the basket between his knees, resettling what’s in there so he’s got more room. “Yeah, you do around here.”

John looks sharply at him. Almost asks and then…hell with it, he’s tired but he still knows this conversation isn’t really going anywhere.

He goes into the kitchen and tugs off the rag from his thumb, which restarts the bleeding. Swishes it through some saltwater, gritting his teeth against the sting, and then he hunts around for a clean cloth to wrap it in. Finding one takes…well, he doesn’t think it’s that long, but when he goes back out, Chris is done. In fact, Chris is busy toting the baskets of discards over to the waste barrel.

“I didn’t miss anything, and you _don’t_ have pigs in here you could feed this to,” Chris says to John.

“If that’s supposed to be a question, or you’re just criticizing, or…look, could you just get back to the room?” John says. “Morning shift’s in less than an hour.”

Chris looks over, while dumping a basket. Then he takes the empty basket and carries it over to one of the courtyard walls, the one he’d need to scale to take that path over the roofs he pointed out to John’s window, and at that point John grabs one of the two remaining baskets.

When John straightens up with it, Chris has vanished. Now, if John really wanted to search the roofs, knowing what he knows, and also having a reasonable idea of how a man like Chris apparently is would move…which John doesn’t want to. Not really.

John’s tired. He dumps the last of the peelings, tidies up a little, and then trudges back through the halls the normal way. When he gets into his room, dawn sun irritatingly bright as it leaks around his shutters—which are shut and locked—there’s a dark, Chris-shaped lump scrunched up against the far wall. He eyes what’s left of the bed, then his floor. Then Chris.

He thinks he can fit. He does sit down on the edge of the bed first, just to give Chris warning, and when the other man doesn’t move, John shrugs and rolls into bed and is falling asleep before he even registers that he’s pressed up against a body on one side.

* * *

The potatoes aside, Chris and Allison both keep a low profile for the next few days. John isn’t sure that they’re staying in his rooms, but then, he’s not checking, and nobody is yelling at him for them.

Anyway, they stay out of sight, waiting for a trade caravan, and he brings back what he can spare of his meals to feed them. Lahey does at least give him what used to be Stiles’ share, not that that’s much, and John manages to supplement that with leftovers and rejects from the guards’ mess. There are more rejects than usual, what with the officers complaining that they can tell their meals are made from poor-quality ingredients. The commander especially still thinks that he should rate the kind of cooking he used to get in the capital.

“Fucking silver-spoon son of a bitch, then he should’ve brought his chef with him,” Lahey storms after a gratin comes back with orders that the cooks go on half-rations till they get it right. He throws a couple pans, kicks a cook, and then spins and points at John. “Stilinski! You’re the last one who was in the capital, you know what they eat there. You do it, and you better make it right or I’m sending your head up with it as a garnish.”

John can’t say anything to that so he doesn’t say anything at all. The rest of the cooks, relieved that they aren’t on the spot—and obviously not going to lend a hand—file out with only a couple throwaway jeers, so eager are they to get away before they get pressed into it. And then John’s in the kitchen by himself with a counter full of rejected gratins.

For a few seconds, he contemplates murder. Then he rolls his sleeves up and grabs the nearest pan and scoops out its contents onto a plate so that, if he doesn’t end up getting killed for assaulting the commander, he can take that away with him. Technically Lahey and all the cooks senior to him have first dibs on leftovers, but to hell with that.

He has a couple bites while he’s washing the pan out to use and he really can’t see what the commander’s complaining about. “Tastes okay to me,” he mutters.

Somebody clears their throat. John picks up a cleaver before he turns around, but it’s just Allison. “Sorry, I know I’m not supposed to be down here, but we overheard the guards calling about a caravan,” she says, gesturing awkwardly. “It just came in, just for the night.”

John’s been in the damn kitchen all day, but she’s got no reason to lie and every reason to tell the truth. “Yeah, well, if you needed something to take along, you can have that,” he says, pointing to the discarded gratin.

He puts the cleaver down and reaches for the pan again, but then he hears his name being called from the hallway. It’s Lahey, and John has to force himself to not reach for the cleaver again.

“Go out the back,” he hisses to Allison, and then he steps into the hallway.

Lahey’s somehow oiled himself with at least half a bottle of wine in the meantime, or at least that’s what his breath smells like, and the booze has given him the bright idea to make John stand there while he goes through all the things the commander didn’t like about the previous gratins, why the commander’s wrong about them, and why even though the commander has a precious princess tongue, John had better not do the same thing. He keeps John out there for nearly an hour.

John points that out to him occasionally, and Lahey ignores him till the very end, when the man gives John a rotten snake of a smug smile and a contemptuous hand-wave. “Well, let’s not keep the princess waiting,” Lahey says. “He’s at the end of his rope, he keeps saying. Can’t accept this anymore, he says. Going to draw a line in the sand, and make us see the consequences of his actions. Wouldn’t want that, would we?”

Again, John doesn’t answer. It does occur to John, as Lahey’s walking off and he’s turning back into the kitchen, that he’s unnaturally calm and this isn’t a good thing and he should fix it before it gets out of hand. He’s got things he needs to do here, for good reasons. He really should keep that all in mind.

The gratin’s gone.

John looks at the spot for a few seconds without realizing why it doesn’t look right to him, and then he remembers he’s not interested in enforcing the kitchen hierarchy. So he turns to the pan…but that’s gone too. And then he realizes that the kitchen actually smells pretty good, and that’s because something’s baking in the oven.

He looks there, and finds the pan, filled with what appears to be some kind of potato dish. It doesn’t look like the gratins they’ve served up before, but it smells delicious and it’s not like John has any time to make another one. Besides, he reasons, Chris and Allison will be out with the caravan in the morning, and once they’re gone, John doesn’t have to worry about keeping his place in the garrison. And he can probably talk Jordan into hiding Stiles’ things for him.

Anyway, John sends up the gratin once it’s done. The commander thinks it’s delicious.

In fact, the commander comes down to personally meet the cook who finally got it right, and then informs Lahey in front of the whole kitchen staff that from now on, John was going to exclusively cook for the officers. And dresses Lahey down for wasting John on common guard mess, and half a dozen other things that’d be trouble if John didn’t already know that succeeding alone would blow fire up the man’s ass.

Lahey’s a cruel, bitter drunk, but he’s the kind of drunk who’s clawed his way over the top of plenty of bodies, and he can bide his time when he wants to. To the commander’s face, he’s deferential, apologetic. Slapping John on the back and smiling and talking about how it’s going to be a new kitchen from now on, with John front and center. Sure.

He even keeps it up once the commander’s gone, firing compliment after compliment at John, asking what John’s secret is, asking whether John can tell him what he’s been doing wrong for so many years. The barbs are starting to come through, but they’re still sheathed enough that the other cooks all sit down for the last meal of the night. They don’t seem that enthusiastic about echoing Lahey’s new conversational approach, but they still want to eat more than they want to leave.

Once the meal’s over, that’s a different story. John has to stay behind since, Lahey says, as the new and _exclusive_ officers’ cook, he’ll want to be shown around the good stuff he was never allowed to touch before. “I still saw where it all is,” John says, following Lahey down into the storage cellar. “This isn’t a big place.”

“You arrogant little _shit_ ,” is how Lahey responds, spinning to aim a punch at John.

He’s not exactly quick with it, or that accurate, and it doesn’t come anywhere near to connecting, but it’s still a punch, and dealing with punches is something John actually does know how to handle. To the point that, frankly, he doesn’t even think about it. He steps back and his knuckles are a little sore and Lahey’s on his ass on the ground, holding his jaw and moaning like a stunned cow.

John has just hit his direct superior. His drunken, abusive superior, but still. This is the man who can put John outside the garrison walls—or have him brought up on false charges of stealing or something like that, which probably would get John executed or thrown in chains, depending on how attached the commander really is to that damn potato dish. And that’s all pretty damn serious, and John should take it seriously, and—hell, he should at least _care_ what happens to himself. Things are bad but he’s never been the depressed type.

“You son of bitch,” Lahey says in a wondering, almost lilting tone. “You hit me.”

“Yep,” John says. The thing is, he thinks, he does care what happens to him. He’s not planning on dying any time soon. But on the other hand, he’s cared less and less about what happens to all the things and people around him, and that’s…that’s not a good thing either. Caring about people he doesn’t have to care about is the only thing standing between him and the soulless bastards who sent him out here.

Lahey says some other things to him, but John admits he’s not listening. He hears the cadence of it and that alone is enough to tell him that Lahey’s back to his usual raving. He nods absently a few times, just out of habit, but he’s more preoccupied with looking around this moldy shithole under a bigger shithole and asking himself how the hell he let things slide so far, and whether he should just walk out the gates now and save them all the trouble, and…

…and he misses his goddamn kid. John actually isn’t mad at Stiles for leaving, not really—his son’s far better than this, and when Stiles saw something that was broken and John didn’t fix it, he did what John would hope he’d do and stepped up. John knows his son is more than good enough to survive out there on his own, and whatever Stiles is up to, it’s almost certainly better. No part of John wants Stiles dragged back to _this_. But…okay, maybe a small part of him is a selfish bastard and wishes he had company.

Anyway, he’s thinking all of that and then out of nowhere, Lahey swings at him with an empty bottle that’d been rolling around on the floor between the vats. John assumes, anyway—he didn’t see where it came from, just sees it coming at his head.

He ducks and dodges back, and Lahey overextends himself and rushes nearly up to a wine barrel that’s been opened up for scrubbing out. The man staggers, pulling up, and then lurches around and something catches him just under the knees. Lahey yelps and drops the bottle and does a strange twirl and somehow pitches himself head-first into the barrel.

John starts forward as soon as he realizes where the man’s headed, but the wet _crunch_ noise brings him up short. He stops and goes up on his toes instead, trying to peer into the barrel without getting any closer to Lahey’s ominously still legs, and that’s when he spots Chris.

“What—why are—” John falls back, winces as he steps on bits of the shattered bottle, and then sees the long pole Chris has in one hand.

Chris sees that he sees and drops it at the same time that John swerves out of his direct line of sight. “Wait, wait, I just saw him going after you,” Chris says, slipping out from between the vats. “I didn’t think he’d fall like _that_.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be out of here with that caravan?” John snaps. His foot slips on some more glass and he steadies himself against one vat. Then he swears and looks back at Lahey.

The man still isn’t moving. Chris doesn’t look like he’s about to attack John, so John pushes by him and goes up to the barrel and looks inside. Then he takes Lahey by the waist and pulls him up till John can see the top of his head. It…looks bad enough that John doesn’t really need to feel at Lahey’s throat for a pulse or breathing, but John checks anyway.

“We should fill it up,” Chris says.

John looks at him. Then sets Lahey’s body back over the rim of the barrel, and looks at Chris again.

“If anyone _was_ going to fall into a wine barrel and crack open his head, it’d be him,” Chris goes on, looking and sounding mildly confused as to why John doesn’t understand what he means. “Fill it up and let somebody else find him, and it’s all explained.”

“I was the last person to see him, all the other cooks know that,” John says. Then grimaces. “Anyway, what the hell am I talking about, that’s not—”

“So just get one of them back into the kitchen when you go up, and I’ll stay here and make noises and you can say he stayed downstairs to do something. Then you both leave,” Chris suggests.

John looks at him again, and when Chris’ expression continues to…to not register that there is a _corpse_ here, John can’t help an annoyed exhale. “Are you saying I should cover this up?”

“Well, if you don’t, do you think they’ll go light on you?” Chris says. He is starting to look a little wary now, and John catches him shifting slightly so that he can better clear John if he’s got to make a break for the ladder. “And even if you haul me out too, they’ll still accuse you of letting me in.”

“If I _can_ haul you out. I’m pretty sure that’s not easy, kind of person who doesn’t laugh at the idea of revenants,” John says. He glances at Lahey again, then sighs and rakes one hand back through his hair. Maybe he’s just imagining things, but his head’s starting to tighten up the way it used to right after Stiles came clean about something, and right before the actual headache started. “Look—why are you even down here? The caravan—”

“Yeah,” Chris says, and then he hesitates. He absently rubs his hand against his hip, leaving dark streaks from the black scum that covers the vats, and John realizes that the man must have been down here for a good while. “Yeah, we missed it. We…Allison came back and told me about the whole problem with the potatoes, and…you did help us. We don’t have anything to pay you with, but I thought I’d go check.”

John raises his brows. “The potatoes came out all right,” he says. “You know, the ones your daughter made and left for me. Commander liked them.”

“Good.” Chris pauses again, but this time he looks faintly embarrassed. “Old family recipe. Usually people like it.”

“He’s from the west country, originally,” John notes. “Same?”

A flicker of something that’s maybe respect, maybe irritation, goes through Chris’ eyes. He makes a noise that could be yes or no or anything in between, and then steps back to the barrel with a slightly forced briskness. “Listen, we know it was an accident, but nobody’s going to believe us, and if we don’t deal with it fast, we’re not going to have a choice in how people look at it. You’re the kind who hides people in your room, you’re not the kind who’d want them caught.”

“Well, you weren’t supposed to _be_ here anymore.” But John can already feel his temper sputtering out. He rubs at the side of his head again, then looks at Lahey.

Does he like killing people, even when it’s justified? No. But honestly, is he going to take the fall over this? No.

“How far up do you think we need to fill it?” John mutters, cutting off Chris in the middle of more persuading. “Can’t swipe that much wine without it coming up later, it’s not like we’ve got so much people don’t keep track of where it goes.”

Chris is relieved, and then he’s thinking. “He had plenty from the sound of it, so I don’t think much. Maybe just enough so it’ll look like he was trying to scoop out some, and lost his balance.”

“From the sound of it?” John says. When Chris looks over, he shrugs but goes and starts hunting around for something they can use to carry the wine. “You said you just saw him going after me.”

“Yeah.” Chris walks off towards the corner, then comes back with a pitcher, which he hands to John, and a broom, which he uses to push the glass shards closer around the barrel so it’ll look like the bottle fell closer to it. “That’s what I saw.”

John goes over to a tapped barrel of the cheap stuff the common guards get and starts to draw it into the pitcher. “Do you have to make me—fine. Just how back did you _hear_?”

He doesn’t actually think Chris is going to answer, and Chris is silent all through rearranging the broken glass, and then, when that’s done, fiddling with Lahey’s corpse: he nudges at how it’s draped over the barrel and moves the arms and even reaches into the barrel to do something. By then John’s dumped in three pitchers and Lahey’s up to his ears in wine, and that seems like good enough.

“Allison was worried,” Chris suddenly says, as John’s straightening up from pouring in the last pitcher. He’s hunched over the barrel too, so when he catches John, their heads are just short of each other. John looks at him and the expression on his face says he’d prefer to just keep his mouth shut, but he’s talking because he thinks John would prefer it. “You stuck your neck out for us, and I know we haven’t given you anything for it.”

“I didn’t ask,” John says after a moment.

Chris doesn’t smile, but his expression warms slightly. “Yeah, we noticed that too. Anyway, like you said, if they aren’t going to care about what’s going on here on the other side of the mountains, there’s no real rush for us to cross.”

It’s on the tip of John’s tongue to remind him that staying put isn’t exactly a safe option either. Which is probably why Chris abruptly hustles John back into the kitchen, taking the pitcher as he does, and tells him to knock his heel against the trapdoor twice when he needs Chris to pretend to be Lahey. And John…

Well, he goes with it. Finds a cook with the excuse that Lahey wants to go over tomorrow’s shifts and walks them back, and then they listen to the fumbling and coughing noises in the cellar and agree that Lahey probably drank himself into forgetting all about it, like usual. Then John walks the man back out, grunting whenever he’s asked about that stupid gratin. Of course, when he returns for his _third_ damn trip to the kitchen, Chris is no longer in the cellar.

John stands there for a few seconds. Then he shuts the trapdoor, grabs a hunk of bread and some cheese for his dinner, and heads out for the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Inspiration](http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/12/hasselback-potato-gratin-casserole-holiday-food-lab.html) for the Argent family gratin.


	3. Chapter 3

When he gets back to his rooms, Chris and Allison are both there waiting for him, and Allison offers him gratin leftovers. “It’s really not bad, I don’t see why he sent it back,” she says. “Anyway, I figured if they were giving you that much of a hard time, they probably wouldn’t give you time to eat.”

She smiles at him and it’s sincere, but behind the helpfulness is that strained, anxious stiffness of somebody who’s afraid of how she’ll be received, and who’s afraid because she’s had bad reactions in the past. It reminds John a lot of Stiles every time he tries to warn somebody, and that’s probably why he takes the leftovers even though the bread and cheese—which was outside of his allotted ration—has already filled him up.

“That recipe of yours,” he says, eyeing both of them. “The commander said he wants it once a week now, and I’m supposed to make it.”

“Oh! Oh, well, I can show you if we can just get a half-hour in the kitchen,” Allison says. “It’s not complicated, and once you get it in the oven, there’s really nothing to do but sit and wait…or I could sneak down there the night before and make it for you. It warms up just as tasty and—”

“Allison,” Chris says quietly. He does a good job of hiding his sudden alarm, but the skin around his eyes and mouth still twitches.

They glance at each other and then Allison excuses herself to go to bed, telling John to just let her know about the recipe. She’s barely in Stiles’ old room before Chris sighs and sits down on the bed he and John have been sharing.

“I know the longer we’re here, the riskier it is for you,” Chris starts.

“So why are you here?” John asks.

Chris’ mouth stays open but nothing comes out. His hand fidgets where it’s lying on his knee, and then he sighs again, ducking his head so he can rub at the back of it. “Well, honestly, I think you could use the help.”

It’s John’s turn to not know what to do with that. “I could ask you,” he finally starts, only to cut himself off with an annoyed grunt. He jiggles the plate of leftovers, thinking, and then remembers why he’s holding it in the first place. Takes a mouthful, because he suspects that Allison probably will notice if he doesn’t, and then puts the plate off to the side and starts pulling his boots off. “Well, but then I’d have to make up my mind what to ask first, and whether it’s really in my best interests to know, and…”

For a couple minutes Chris watches him. Doesn’t move except to shift his elbows a little forward on his lap, so he’s leaning slightly towards John. “You don’t know how to cook.”

“Are you really going to say that’s what’s keeping you here?” John snaps. He jerks halfway back up and nearly stumbles over his own foot, misjudging how easily it’ll come out of the unlaced boot. After catching himself against the wall, he yanks that boot the rest of the way off and pitches both under the bed. “A job?”

“I need money,” Chris says, his shoulders moving in a small shrug.

John rests one hand on his knee and looks at the other man.

The side of Chris’ mouth twitches. It could be a nervous tic, but that doesn’t really match up with the level way he’s looking back. “And you’re down a man,” he adds.

“Yeah.” Grimacing, John straightens back up. His back protests like a mudlogged cow and when he puts his hand to it, the muscles in his neck and shoulders start to pull on him. “Sure. Right. There’s an opening.”

“I’m a decent cook,” Chris says. He glances at the door to the other room. “Taught her how to do it.”

“Look, just—” John thinks he wants to ask one thing and then his exasperation boils over, just from the way the man just _sits_ there, and something else comes out “—is this funny to you? Just tell me that, would you?”

“I’m not,” Chris says, his hand coming out, his voice rising, a genuine look of dismay on his face. A slight noise in the other room stops him before he gets fully off the bed; he doesn’t look over, but he holds himself a few inches off the bed for the space of a breath. Then he sits back down. He’s kneading at the edge of the bed a little. “It’s a real offer. Allison and I, we’re not here to live off of charity.”

John wasn’t actually looking to spook the man, he just…he’s been short-tempered lately. Well, that and he just covered up a dead body and he really doesn’t feel that terrible about it and suddenly, a small part of him wonders whether it’s better to have Stiles away just because his son doesn’t need to see John be a hypocrite.

“Fine,” John sighs. He’s tired. He should get some sleep, and not just because he may be turning into a coldblooded son of a bitch, but because if he _doesn’t_ sleep soon, he may just forgo the coldblooded part of that. After all, he’s still got to get the commander that damn gratin every day now. “Can you move over?”

Chris looks surprised, but he scoots towards one end of the bed. Then he starts as John steps towards the bed, as if he didn’t realize that’s why John needed the room—John stops, his hands halfway through undoing his belt, and the man shrugs and pulls up his legs and moves towards the wall. Still kind of flustered—which is just a couple awkward shuffles, but with the precise way he moves otherwise, that stands out—but John stops himself from feeling too guilty about that when he remembers the corpse in the cellar.

John hangs his belt over the foot of the bed and tugs at the waistband of his trousers, but the night’s on the chilly side and he doesn’t have a hearth in his room, so he keeps them on. He pulls loose the neck of his shirt while he’s getting under the blankets, then turns on his side. Then starts to push up, remembering there’s a lantern hanging over him, and then lies back down. One, he’s tired, and two, he doesn’t know that Chris and Allison—who has to go back through his room to get to the washroom down the hall—are turning in now, and three, he’s tired.

He closes his eyes. Chris is squeezed up against the wall, but he’s still sitting up and John can just sense the warmth of the man’s feet up by John’s back. That and how the toes flex, rucking up the sheet some.

“You know they’re spreading down the road towards this pass, right?” Chris suddenly says. “Revenants?”

Halfway to sleep, John’s unpleasantly dragged back by that lingering habit of trying to get things done, even when there’s nothing worth doing. For a second he contemplates rolling over and kicking Chris out of bed. Then he sighs. “Yeah.”

Chris is silent for a second. “You go out on those supply runs often?”

“Why, did you want to crawl back in?” John mutters. “You know they go out empty, right?”

“I assumed that’s why they were shipping you bad potatoes,” Chris says dryly. He still shifts around like he’s uneasy, though he stops when he starts talking again. “No, I was just…considering. Must make you the most likely to run into one. The guard doesn’t get sent out, so I hear.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Then John rolls over. “I haven’t actually seen one up close. I try to get in before night falls, so mostly I’ve seen where they’ve been, what they’ve done.”

“That’s not something you should be regretting, not having a run-in,” Chris says, his voice dropping slightly, a shadow passing over his face. Then he sees something in John’s expression and he frowns, tilting his head. “Look, I’m not going to steal the wagon or anything. I was just thinking, since you’ve got the potato obligation now, you might not have a lot of time for all the other things you need to get done.”

“And you need a job,” John says. He rolls back over, then lets his breath slowly out into his pillow. This is a bad idea. On the other hand, he knew that right when he heard them moving around under the potatoes, and he walked right next to them for hours and he _literally_ has no one around to kid. He’s doing this. “Fine, just I’d appreciate it if you actually _told_ me first, the next time you do something?”

Chris makes a noncommittal noise. Which he may or may not follow up with something more meaningful, but he leaves such a long pause in between that John just refuses to slide out of sleep to figure out what it is.

John’s an asshole, just in case the dead body wasn’t obvious enough. He’ll deal with it in the morning.

* * *

In the morning, they find Lahey.

Actually, the quartermaster finds Lahey, because for some reason Thomas needs to check how much of the Falernian that hasn’t gone vinegary they have left, and then screams so loudly that he wakes half the cooks. The other half wake up when the quartermaster declares that since that drunk’s gone and potentially spoiled half their wine just by being dead and nearby and they just can’t _afford_ that, there’s no way the guards can go without their alcoholic rations unless somebody wants mutiny and if it’s mutiny then he’ll have them all in front of the commander…they’re going to spend the day cleaning out the cellar and rotating all the barrels.

Also, John gets a promotion.

“Because nobody wants Lahey’s job,” John tells a far-too-enthused Jordan. “Why are you excited?”

“Well, for one, now I know for sure when I spend the night perched over a latrine and emptying out my guts, it’s completely pure incompetence in the kitchen and not maliciousness,” Jordan says, still grinning like a loon. “Two, don’t tell me you haven’t been itching to whip these people into shape. Come on. I might have spent my whole life on the border, but I can peg a career officer when I see one.”

“Look, you can either shut up and get me more moonshine from that still you’re not supposed to have, or you can help scrape off mold,” John says.

Jordan chooses to disappear. John goes back down into the cellar and within the hour, the biggest of the cooks left decides to square up to him over an order to go over a spot the man hadn’t cleaned properly. Look, it’s a thankless and pointless job, because the real problem is that the cellar’s drainage hasn’t been maintained and until that’s cleared out, it’ll stay so damp downstairs that they can practically watch the mold grow back over lunch. But if you’re not going to walk off, you’d better do the damn job, has always been John’s philosophy. Trying to puff around like a fighting cock so somebody will say the shit job you did is _fine_ doesn’t count as doing the job.

Anyway, even though he’s sober, the man doesn’t know how to aim a punch any better than Lahey. John gives him a bloody—but unbroken—nose and a sore jaw, points out to the rest of them that they want to start something, fine, but then one of them will have to step into John’s shoes, and after that they quiet down.

Meal service that day goes all right, John supposes. Lahey usually spent those in an incoherent rage, lashing out with a bottle or his foot, and John never could actually understand what the man was yelling. Or what the man was looking at, since he spent most of his time in one corner of the kitchen, about as far from the actual cooking as he could be and still be in the same room.

So when John’s up, he just tells the men to do their jobs and then stands where he can see all of them with one glance. They’re still pretty subdued, but it doesn’t have that crackling tension of people plotting something, and the few times the line breaks down, it’s because somebody took their eye off the hearth and burnt something, or somebody’s trying to hide that they’re bleeding into the potato mash, or things like that. Which aren’t too far off from guards trying to sneak past morning inspection with hangovers and stained clothes, and _that_ , John can handle just fine.

Things are going well enough by the evening meal that he tells Chris to slip down to a backroom to show him how to put together the gratin for the commander. It’s a dogleg off the main kitchen and while it’s got a window onto the back courtyard, the window’s small with rusty shutters that squeal whenever the wind rattles them. So it’s risky, but on the other hand, the other cooks seem genuinely intent on doing their jobs, and anyway, the dogleg’s on the opposite side of all the other storage rooms, so there’s no reason for them to be poking into this part of the hallway.

“It’s how you cut them,” Chris explains, holding up a potato and a knife. He angles the knife a couple ways over the potato, pursing his lips, and then makes a swift series of slices that turn it into a kind of accordion-looking thing thin slices held together just by a strip of skin. “Normally you’d make all the cuts parallel and it’d look prettier, but the key is getting the slices the same thickness so they’ll cook evenly.”

“Can’t really do that with something as mangled as this,” John says. He flicks another potato, right at where they’d had to carve out the rotten pieces, and an amused look goes over Chris’ face. “Think I get what you mean. So like this?”

Chris watches John try to cut up a potato the same way. The amusement fades out of the man’s eyes and he starts sucking his breath between his teeth, especially whenever John tugs the knife free of the potato, which is getting slippery with leaked juices and honestly feels as if it’s holding in the blade at times. His hands twitch up once like he’s going to grab at John’s wrists and John stops and Chris opens his mouth. Pauses, then looks at the basket of potatoes.

“You know, I could probably cut these up while you grate the cheese,” Chris says. He looks like it’s physically painful for him to not say anything else.

“I don’t think it looks that bad,” John says.

Chris whistles his breath between his teeth again, this time less because he’s worried than because he clearly thinks John is a blind idiot. He lifts his hand, hesitates, and then silently puts his potato next to John’s.

“The whole trick is getting the right thickness,” Chris says. “Too thin and they’ll burn, too thick and they don’t get that nice crispy top.”

“So you’re saying I don’t know how to use a knife,” John says.

Chris looks at him. Then at the potatoes.

“If I didn’t pull you and your daughter out over Lahey, why the hell would I do it over a couple potatoes?” John mutters. And he means it, but he sounds irritated and that’s because he _is_ irritated because he’s not a cook, never has been, and…fine, Chris has a good point, even if he’s suddenly beating around the bush about it. “All right, have the potatoes, I’ll take the cheese.”

“Knife-handling when it comes to vegetables is nothing like any other kind of knife-handling,” Chris says. He takes the basket of potatoes and starts in on them, but he keeps giving John these quick glances, like he’s not sure that John picking up the grater and the cheese wedge is a great idea, either. “I’ve hunted with men who can dress a stag in twenty minutes but who can’t even remember to take the tops off of carrots.”

He’s trying to soothe John’s pride, and if it weren’t for this damn job, John wouldn’t even have to care about knowing how to cook a potato, and…the annoyance flushes out of John, leaving him just shaking his head at himself. “Yeah. Yeah, so I’ve learned. My son said something like that whenever I tried to cut up some of his herbs…he was studying to be an herbalist, and sometimes I’d get home late and need something to slap on a bruise but I didn’t want to wake him. But he’d get so worked up about my ‘hack job,’ it wasn’t really worth…”

Graters shouldn’t be that hard. You put one end of something against it, push, and move your hand up and down. But this grater has a hinge on it and the two halves flip this way and that, and John is trying to remember how to tell which is the grating surface when he senses movement.

He looks up and Chris stops, hand halfway across the table. Then leans over a few more inches and carefully does something with his fingers and the grater makes a clicking sound and locks into position. “Your son’s gone back to the capital?” Chris asks.

“Did it sound like that’s where he was?” John says. He stares at the grater, half-thinking he should remember this for next time, and then he sighs and puts it down and just starts grating. He’s not going to remember, he knows that, and he’ll just…well, he’s been promoted, maybe he can make another cook handle that for him. He’ll still do his share of the grating, it’s not an abuse of power so much as delegating it. “You heard Lahey.”

“No, but I didn’t want to just guess from that. I’ve got a kid too, I know…” Chris bends down to the potatoes and whips through three of them, then glances up again. At first he’s looking at the curls of cheese coming out of the grater, but then his eyes drift up. “Is he in the guard?”

“If he was, he’d be shut up in here and I’d at least know where he is,” John mutters. Then catches himself, and is in the middle of wondering whether he should be telling even that much to an almost-stranger when he hooks the back of his thumb on the grater hole. “Shit.”

“Here.” Chris flips a clean rag at him and almost in the same movement, scoops back most of the cheese before the blood can hit it. Then the man comes around the table and takes the grater to wash it off and wipe it. He does that as quick as he does anything else, sets it back on the table, and then steps away.

Doesn’t go back around the table. John’s thumb is still bleeding when he checks under the rag, so he ties that off and picks up the cheese again. Then sighs. “You going to just say maybe I should do something else till I’m just holding the pan for you?”

“You’re supposed to be the head cook now, shouldn’t you be out there directing anyway?” Chris says. He does some odd, strained things with his expression and voice, and it takes John a few seconds to realize the man is trying to joke. Takes Chris just about as long to see it’s not coming off well—he winces and then retreats back around the table. “Look, I’ll finish this and I know we’re pushing it, and I don’t want to get caught either so—”

“I’m a goddamn soldier. My father was a soldier, and his father, and the most a soldier needs to know how to make is boiled coffee and flapjacks and bacon,” John mutters. He jiggles the cheese in his hand. “Anybody who thinks I’m ever going to be a cook should end up head-down in a wine barrel.”

Sensibly, Chris doesn’t say anything to that. He just goes back to the potatoes, and after a second, John starts grating cheese again. Watching his thumb a little more closely.

“That’s good,” Chris says suddenly. When John looks up, he nods at the little heap by the grater. “That’s saltier, so you don’t want as much. More like three-two, instead of one-one.”

John nods and switches to the second block of cheese. It’s also harder than the first one, so he’s still working on it when Chris runs out of potatoes. The other man looks around, finds the basket where John put the salt and spices, and starts pulling out things.

“Stiles isn’t here,” John finds himself saying. Maybe it’s how Chris stops and sticks a finger into the dried herbs, sniffing at them and then sighing, and how it reminds John of how much of a stickler his son is about too-old ingredients. “He’s not in…he’s just not here. Terms of our exile, long as we’re not coming back over the pass or trying to get another official position, they don’t really care what we do.”

Chris gives John a thoughtful look, though he semi-hides it in the bustle of mixing up stuff in a bowl. When John does get the cheese done, Chris adds that and then stirs it in with one hand, while with the other he reaches for the potatoes. “Is the pan greased already?”

“No,” John says, checking. “No, but I got it.”

“Well, I don’t have the hands,” Chris says dryly. His unflappability still seems like a warning flag to John, but he has to admit, he’s kind of seeing the social advantages of it. “So…you could join him?”

John stops with his hand in the pan. He watches his fingers clench around the greasy rag, butter oozing up around his fingernails. On the other side of the table Chris makes a low, hissing noise. Regretful, John thinks, and he tilts his head and goes back to rubbing the rag around. It’s probably just the hangover from covering up Lahey’s death, but the last thing he wants in his mind right now is more regrets. “Yeah, but I stick around here because it’s one thing for him to run off, and it’s another for a former captain of the palace guard to be loose in the wilderness. And I guess I figure if things get so bad we’ve all got to go back over the pass, I want to make sure someone’s around to see he gets in. I’m all he has.”

“It’s the same for Allison and me,” Chris says. He makes it sound like that might be all John gets, and he does spend the next few minutes showing John how to lay the potatoes in the pan to make sure they cook through right. But then he inhales a little sharply, making John look up—he’s looking down, poking the last slice into place. “You probably guessed already, but we’re from one of the hunting guilds.”

“The old ones? No temple?” John says immediately.

Too fast, he thinks, he should’ve slowed that down and not pushed right off the mark. But Chris just gives him a tight nod. “Yeah. Well, was. Guild’s just us now.”

“What fam—” John starts to ask, only for them to both freeze as they hear John’s name being called from the main kitchen.

It’s too close to the doorway, so John goes out and pulls the door after him—he makes sure not to yank it all the way shut, because with how thick it is, Chris won’t be able to hear what’s going on and he thinks the man will be better at improvising if he’s not in the dark. “Yeah?”

“Stilinski,” says Quartermaster Thomas, perspiring and a little harried and twitchy, as usual. “We need to talk.”

“I’m in the middle of the commander’s gratin,” John says.

Thomas blinks hard, then groans as things connect for him. Normally that’d take care of it, since the bane of his life—and one of the few times John ever feels sympathetic towards him—is trying to stretch their limited resources for the commander’s stupid whims, but today Thomas is standing his ground. Standing it with a quiver in the hand he pokes at John, but he’s standing it.

“I don’t know what you’re up to with the guards, Stilinski, but now is neither the time nor the place,” Thomas hisses. “Payroll is a week late and the commander’s having a hell of a time keeping things calm, and if you’re as smart as you seem, you’ll step up now that Lahey’s gone and keep everybody fed and quiet till we figure out where that wagon’s gotten to. All right?”

“Should you be telling me that?” John says, blinking. Then he remembers he’s still just a cook, even if he’s now _head_ cook. “Sir.”

“Do you have to be—” Thomas steps back and glances around, looking a little bit like a hunted mouse. He wipes some sweat off his brow and then glares at John again. “Listen. Nobody misses Lahey, so nobody really cares how he ended up down there. But I’m trying to keep this place from falling apart and I thought you were a reasonable type, and—”

John raises his brows. He’s not so stupid as to actually interrupt the man, but Thomas has never struck him as the sharpest knife in the…well, the kitchen, even if the man’s meticulous to a fault about keeping his accounts.

“Oh, look, I don’t want to know. Lahey was the kind of drunk, he was going to stick around till somebody took him out back and shot him, but drunks, you never do know, do you?” Thomas says, with a nervous eye-roll. He wipes at his face again. “I just want things running smoothly, and that means no secret night trips to do who knows what, all right? At least have the decency to pretend you’re going out for more supplies, or something that’s deniable. Got that?”

“I heard you, sir,” John says, in as noncommittal a tone as he can manage.

“Good,” Thomas says. He takes a deep breath and resets his shoulders, and then looks up in a more friendly way at John. “Well, at least you’ve got that gratin going, that should keep the commander happy for one more night.”

“If I can get back to it now, sir?” John says. He takes a step towards the door and then puts his hand on it, which casually blocks Thomas from following him. He doesn’t say anything about having to keep it a secret, or not exposing it to hallway air or the kind of excuse his son would come up with; he just stands there, passively uncooperative.

It works. Thomas mutters something about just keep up his end of the bargain, and there might even be a bump in wine rations in it for John, and then wanders back through the kitchen. John hears the cooks sniggering at the man and goes in for a few minutes to make sure order is restored, and also ends up seeing that Thomas does, in fact, leave.

When he gets back to the room, the gratin is fully assembled and Chris is no longer in the room. The shutters on the window don’t look as if they’ve been touched. John picks up the pan, then puts it down. Then picks it back up.

“Thomas is an _officer_ ,” John says to nobody in particular, seeing as the room is empty. “Officers get noticed. It’s a small garrison, and I…fine, that’s enough, and I’ll say the same thing when I’m back tonight.”

Nothing answers him when he walks out with the pan.

* * *

The gratin works just as well as it did last night, and at staff meal, a couple of the cooks cautiously toast to John’s health. He thanks them, but he’s not so dumb as to think they’ve been won over for good. He’s also not as much of a hoarder as Lahey—and why the man did that, John will never know now, since Lahey couldn’t taste anything but alcohol—which automatically doubles everybody’s portion size and makes them happy enough to not care he’s the first to leave. Or that he’s taking a tripled serving of food with him.

But he doesn’t go straight back to his rooms. No, thanks to Thomas, he has to track Jordan down in the barracks and then drag him out to behind the stable. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Doing?” Jordan says, looking blank.

“Thomas just warned me off the guards because someone is sneaking into the woods at night,” John snaps. “So don’t give me that look.”

To his credit, Jordan immediately deflates the innocent act. On the other hand, he decides to replace it with mulishness. “Well, it’s not like we’d have any idea what’s going on otherwise, and you’re the one who noticed that the reports are getting closer to the garrison. So maybe me and a couple other people who don’t want to stick our heads in the sand are doing the recon we’re trained to do.”

“So maybe you should get better at it, if _Thomas_ of all people’s caught on,” John says. Then he stops and rubs at the side of his face, because…honestly, that hadn’t been where he’d been planning to go. 

Jordan’s surprised too, and to the point that he has to open and close his mouth a few times before getting around to the grin. “Sure, okay, we can do that. You just got promoted, we all, from the bottoms of our stomachs, want that to last.”

“And why does Thomas think I’m involved with this, exactly?” John snaps.

“Oh, well…I’m not positive, I’ll have to look into it, but if I had to guess…because I told people our standard excuse was we’re foraging for salt because that’s something they’re shorting us on that we can’t make in a still,” Jordan says, looking a little embarrassed. And a little proud, and if he ever knew part of why John puts up with him is because of the ways he echoes Stiles, he’d abuse the hell out of that.

John sighs and considers telling the man to stop before it gets up to the commander, and save them all some trouble. But realistically, the window for that’s passed, and that has nothing to do with whether or not he still wants a friendly relationship with Jordan. And anyway, he should have seen this coming, what with not being able to help asking about revenants whenever he got to go out of the fort, and telling Jordan everything he knows about them, and…Thomas is right. He _is_ involved, and he’s just been pretending he hasn’t been. He’s not just waiting around for his son.

“Hey…listen, we were—I wasn’t trying to get you into the shit,” Jordan adds. He gets his arm back and tugs at the hair at the back of his head, looking uncomfortable, but determined. “But with everything we’ve been finding out, we couldn’t just _sit_ here. Look, aside from what’s going to happen to everybody outside, if we just keep our eyes closed, then when they get here we’re going to go down in flames for being unprepared. So I was just—”

“Did you actually get any salt?” John asks. Because that is a problem. Way, way back, this area used to be rich in salt mines, but once they built the roads, cheaper salt from the coast flooded in and closed all the mines.

Of course, that only works so long as the roads are open to trade, and since that’s dying out, salt’s in short supply too. And it’s been so long that almost nobody around here remembers the mines. It’s only outsiders like John who have learned the history, and when he’s tried to bring it up, they think it’s as much of a fantasy as revenants.

“A little, but not a lot,” Jordan admits. “On the other hand, we’re getting some villagers to actually talk to us. But it’s hard going. They’re afraid.”

“Well, yeah, if I had to choose between revenants and a garrison that insists on a tithe without doing anything—”

“No, not that. Well, there’s that, but also there’s some other…there’s this rumor some of the revenants act like they’re smart, targeting certain people,” Jordan interrupts. He tells John slowly, clearly having his doubts, but just as clearly not able to just dismiss it out of hand. “I don’t know about that, but maybe some of the villages have been suffering so long they’ve started to get a little crazy. You know, try and act like these things can be bargained with.”

John gets cold, hearing that. His old job hadn’t involved hiding as many bodies as people think when they hear it was in the palace, but it’d still had more to do about making compromises—and bad ones—than John had ever liked. And on top of that, knowing his history means John knows how dark things got the last time revenants were active. When people don’t think they have anyone to protect them, they can make some horrible decisions.

“What kind of bargains?” John asks.

“Leaving out something for them to eat. Animals. I think.” Jordan doesn’t sound very confident in that. “It’s why I was taking the risk to go out. Something like that, I want to _know_.”

“They don’t eat,” John mutters after a moment. He starts to say he needs to check on something, but cuts that off when he remembers Stiles took all the books with him. His damn memory’s not as good as it used to be either, and…well, he just needs to make it work. “They’re dead. They’re not animals, when they want to take your life, it’s not that that will fill them up and they’ll stop.”

“Yeah, you said that,” Jordan says, looking more and more worried. “So—”

John presses his hand over his face and makes himself think. Then he takes it down and looks at Jordan. “How many of you are there?”

“Not a lot. Most people still don’t want to—they just want to get out of here, they don’t care what’s going on,” Jordan says. “I think more of them will come around if we can just show them, but it’s just me and four, five others.”

“Stay in,” John says, and then holds up his hand. “No, listen. Thomas knows something, so you need to cool it off till he isn’t suspicious. I’m head cook now so I can ask him for a bigger supply detail. We’ll still go out, but in the day and when we’re expected to. Or I’m not telling you _anything_ anymore.”

“Got it,” Jordan says immediately, no fussing, not even a hint of protest. In fact, he’s gone back to looking delighted. “Finally. I can’t believe you waited so long to handle Lahey.”

John pauses. Then, very carefully, looking Jordan straight in the eye: “Lahey had an accident.”

“Yep, yeah, and I don’t usually speak ill of the dead, but let’s just say the timing could be a lot worse, right?” Jordan says, grinning. “So when are we going out?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s cleared. So sit tight.” A second after John steps back, he looks over his shoulder. Jordan’s still grinning. “Parrish?”

“Sitting.” As he plops down onto the nearest stack of saddles. He slaps his hands on his knees and then folds his arms over his lap and keeps grinning. “Sat. Seated.”

John is going to regret this. He already has the headache.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Falernian is an extinct type of wine, made during ancient Roman times.


	4. Chapter 4

“Oh, this is nice,” Allison says, unwrapping the food John’s brought her and Chris. She goes into the other room and then comes back with some kind of folding table they’ve made out of a side of a crate and a couple cut-down spear handles, as well as cutlery and napkins that John does not remember having.

“They were going to throw them out,” Chris explains, seeing where John’s looking. “We didn’t want to keep asking you to steal things, so we’ve been a little creative, but we’re not taking anything people still want.”

Allison smiles a little anxiously, shifting around the table to stand beside her father. “And we have the time on our hands to fix them up. I wanted to fix your things too, but Dad said I shouldn’t just touch them without—”

“Fix my what?” John asks, momentarily distracted. He’d thought he’d kept things up pretty well. Sure, he’s been slowly losing both his morals and his mind, but he hasn’t let himself get slipshod.

“Oh, well, your—I noticed your shirts had some burns and holes, and I could sew those up, and your shoes are almost worn out, they need to be resoled, and…anything I could help with, anyway,” Allison says, while Chris looks as if he wishes they’d just eat. “Dad told me about your promotion so I’m guessing you’ll be busier, and if you need anything, just let me know.”

“Thanks,” John says, since unless he wants to be rude, he can’t really say anything else.

She smiles at him, and then starts dividing up the food. Equal portions, even though John tells them he gets to eat at the staff meal. Chris mutters that he left early and Allison just says whatever isn’t eaten, she’ll wrap up for later.

It’s…a nice meal. John does eat some, since talking with Jordan went on longer than he figured and the kitchen was empty—including leftovers—when he checked in afterward. Nobody talks much, although occasionally Allison tries to make polite conversation, asking how the gratin went, whether things around the garrison are calm. Whenever John asks something back, she deflects or Chris jumps in, but John does learn a few things about them.

Chris’ wife and Allison’s mother is probably dead, and she’s been gone long enough that neither of them look like mentioning her stings, though Allison drops her voice slightly whenever she comes up. Allison knows where the armory is, and likely has been inside it, which means if John sweeps through Stiles’ old room now, he’d probably turn up some pilfered weapons. Allison seems to know as much as her father does about revenants, and doesn’t like being called a hunter, to the point that she talks over her father when he tries to change the subject to ask John not to do that.

John apologizes and she says, with a darted look at her father’s stony face, that she’d prefer to be called a tracker. Then they talk about cooking. She’s been in the stores at some point, too, and wants John to know that Chris has some really good recipes for all the beets they’ve been stockpiling because nobody knows how to make them edible.

“We’re hunters, she just…wasn’t raised into it, and she doesn’t like a lot of the traditions. I don’t—we’ve both fallen away from most of them, so she doesn’t think it’s the right name,” Chris explains later. Out of the blue, when he and John are getting into bed.

Well, he’s already in bed, and John is perched at the edge and trying to shave using a mirror and a bowl of water balanced on his knees. “Okay,” John mutters, working his blade along his jaw.

“We don’t just find things or people to kill them. It’s only if they’re causing too much damage, and there’s no way to reason with them,” Chris goes on.

He sounds as if Allison isn’t the only one who’s been having struggles with the term ‘hunter’ and it’s probably the most revealing he’s been so far, and John still almost asks whether Chris could’ve picked a time when John wasn’t scraping a blade down his neck arteries. Then John sighs and swishes the soap off the razor. “So you’re going to tell me revenants actually can talk and we can ask them nicely to stop?” he says.

“What? No, they’re one of the few things out there you _can’t_ afford to leave alone, ever, no matter the circumstances,” Chris says, sounding outraged John would even suggest that.

John looks over his shoulder at the other man and Chris subsides with a slightly embarrassed look, apparently remembering that John honestly has no idea who he is. He’s quiet as John finishes up shaving, but then holds out a towel when John reaches for that.

“I’m not sure what you’ve heard about the old guilds, the ones who didn’t find a temple, but what I know, they don’t have a good name in the capital,” Chris says. Then he releases the towel.

“Yeah, that’s true.” Halfway through wiping off his cheek, John realizes he missed a whole strip near his ear. He curses and drops the towel, and then scrapes some foam from where it’s floating in the bowl, dabs it on, and shaves it off. “Then again, from the point of view up there, it’s not really the guilds so much as being something that doesn’t run through the capital, so they can’t be controlled from there.”

Chris scoops the towel up, folding it so the unused side is up, and then offers it to John again. “Well, nothing left of ours to control, anyway.”

“You never got around to saying which one that was,” John says. He takes the towel but watches the way Chris’ face tightens and then smooths out. “Or if that’s part of why you’re running and hiding…look, as long as you’re not one of the Chastels.”

“If I was a Chastel, you’d be days dead and this place would be a smoking ruin,” Chris says, offended again. Then he eases his back against the wall, pulling up one knee so he can rest his chin on it. He looks a lot less haggard than when he’d first arrived, with a spare handsomeness that must be hard to keep inconspicuous, but he still looks around John’s age. Doesn’t bend like it, John notes with no little envy. “That really _is_ a legendary name at this point. The rest of us banded together and flushed out the ones the army didn’t catch—what they did was beyond the pale for all of us.”

“Good to know.” John wipes his face off and then gets up to dump the bowl. “Well, if I ever have the chance to send back word, the record-keepers will be happy to put that one into the archives.”

Chris shifts as if he means to rise, too, but he just moves to the edge of the bed. “If I…if you could, would you go back?” he asks. “Are you looking to?”

Why would he be interested, is the first thing John thinks to say. But then he sees how rigid Chris is, as if this is more important than just curiosity, and he thinks back over their conversation, and…he’d said that about sending word back because that’s habit again, thinking about cleaning up things in the capital. Habits and habits and with Lahey breathing down his neck, he’s never really had the time or space or temper to really think about why he still has those. Or if he should.

He’s just getting the time and space now, and it’s going to take a while. But he’s already sure about a few things. He knows that from how they just jump into his head when he stops for a second. “No, I’m not,” John says with a shrug. “I wanted to do my job and that’s what got me sent here. I don’t think getting called back would mean I’d get to do what I wanted to do in the first place. It’d just mean that they ran out of bodies back there—and the problem’s here, not in the capital. The one I still care about fixing, anyway.”

John turns to the door and he’s got his hand on it when Chris clears his throat. “We’re Argents,” he says.

“That name’s had its ups and downs,” John says after a moment.

Chris is grimacing, his tone alone tells John. “Yeah.”

After a second, John opens the door. He makes a quick trip down the hall to the toilet to empty out the bowl, then comes back. Chris has crawled to his side and has slid his legs under the blankets, but he’s still sitting up, waiting for John.

“Don’t do anything to Thomas,” John suddenly remembers to tell him.

“Your quartermaster?” Chris says, raising his brows. His eyes say he knows exactly why John is bringing that up.

“He’s just nervous, he’s not deliberately trying to screw people like Lahey,” John mutters. He gets into bed and fluffs up his pillow, and then burrows in for some time where he doesn’t have to keep track of all the things he’s apparently supposed to be scheming about. “Besides, he goes, I’ll have the commander personally oversee—no, wait, he’s got Haigh, probably put him on it. Who’d be even worse.”

“I’m not trying to make things hard for you,” Chris says. He gets up and climbs over John to blow out the lantern, and then climbs back in. Drops down before he goes on, so his voice ends up closer and quieter, coming off more sincerely. “I’d like to make them easier.”

John sighs and presses his face into his pillow. “Just keep it quiet, that’s all I want right now.”

Chris shifts under the sheets. He’s not pressing himself so tightly against the wall these days. Still respectful of John’s space, but not to the point that he’s contorting himself. “Quiet,” he says. “I can do that.”

* * *

Two weeks of successful potato gratin later, John goes to Thomas with a rind off a ham. “We’re short on meat and due for a run anyway,” he tells the quartermaster. “If you give me a couple guards, then if the village doesn’t have anything, we can hunt up some game.”

Thomas is relieved because the payroll wagon finally made it through—though all it had was half as much pay as it should and a little wine for the officers, and none of the other supplies that are supposed to ship with it—and authorizes the trip without any more questions, and just one nag to get things the commander will want to eat. John nods and then heads off to give Jordan the good news, only to find him and Allison talking.

“He came up to your room and he and Dad nearly killed each other and then he said he helped you on the kind of trips where we came in,” Allison explains, looking a little annoyed with Parrish. “So we assumed you’d told him about us. He acted like it.”

Jordan smiles sheepishly at John. “Well, you usually do. Anyway, she wanted something for cleaning some of your blades, and she let me see them and that is a _nice_ sword to let get rusty and why don’t I just send her back with that now?”

“Yeah,” John says. He lets Allison get a step towards the door. “And put that back _exactly_ where you found it.”

Allison nods and then makes herself vanish. Jordan stops looking so ashamed and starts looking more defensive. “You kept your sword? Don’t they confiscate that when you lose your—”

“They just take the ceremonial one. That’s the one I actually used, and why the hell were you breaking into my rooms?” John snaps. Then he shakes his head. “No, if you caught him off-guard, you had a key so _why_ do you have a key to my rooms?”

“Stiles,” Jordan says. He looks a little rattled by how angry John is, but still draws himself up. “Look, I didn’t know he was going to run off, or I would’ve told you, I swear, but—he left me a note. And basically, it said please watch out for my dad and here’s my key in case you need to hit him over the head and drag him out because he’s too honorable to go.”

That…sounds like Stiles, and all of a sudden John’s anger is gone and in its place is a deep hollow. He thinks he’s used to not having his son underfoot, and he thinks he really believes—well, he does really believe Stiles is better off outside the garrison than in. But he thinks he’s gotten used to missing Stiles and then he realizes he’s not really that good.

“Anyway, I wasn’t up there just for the hell of it. I saw Chris sneaking in your window and got worried—I knew you weren’t in there, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on, and speaking of that, _why_ didn’t you tell me we were sneaking in hunters?” Jordan goes on, moving from apologetic to offended. “Honestly, am I not the _most_ likely person in this entire garrison to be happy we’re getting expert help?”

So Chris or Allison, or both, admitted to Jordan that they’re hunters, when it took John days to get that out of Chris. It’s annoying. But…telling Jordan that would get him automatically on their side, and he clearly thinks that this was all part of John’s plan because he thinks John is some kind of mastermind and John suddenly realizes that Chris and Allison have to have been spying on him and Jordan.

“Yeah. Yeah, well, look, Haigh was on you and I had to deal with Lahey, so I didn’t have the time,” John says. He has more excuses ready, but Jordan’s face is already clearing up and the man obviously just wanted to know that John wasn’t going to leave him out of it forever. “But I still can’t ask Thomas to let them stay as…as…”

“Your servants?” Jordan suggests. “You could at least use a valet, looking at that sword.”

John glowers at him. And fine, makes a note to himself to check whether that hollow he made in the wall’s getting seepage from the roof, but he needs Jordan to be practical, damn it. “I am a _cook_. Even if it’s head cook, that’s not enough for servants. That’s barely enough to get Thomas to okay a supply run with more guards than just you—”

“ _Oh_. Oh, okay, I will leave the contraband hunters to you, and get right on organizing that,” Jordan says, lighting up.

“Wait a second, wait,” John sighs, grabbing the man by the arm and hauling him back. He’s semi-forgotten how much leading soldiers can be like minding kids, although it’s all coming back now. “Yeah. So I want to know more about these revenant reports as much as you do. But—”

“Potatoes, got it,” Jordan says.

John stares at him till the man stops pulling against his grip and settles down for an actual listen. Then gives him a good shake, just for emphasis, before letting go. “First, it’s meat this time. Preferably something we can make bacon out of.”

“Well, for that we also need salt,” Jordan says. Then he ducks his head and gives John an apologetic look. “Of course, you already knew that, being head cook of the kitchen and all…”

Salt and meat being the two ingredients for salted meat—yeah, John knew that, kind of. Anyway, it’s just another distraction and John waves it off. “Whatever we need to get to fill up the spaces where the hams used to be,” he mutters. “The second, and more important point, is if anybody’s trying something with the revenants like what you were saying, we have to keep them from thinking we’re onto them. Or even that we’re _not_ onto them, but we’re going out in bigger groups for other reasons. Because the last thing we need is to get attacked by revenants before anybody in here knows what to do about them.”

That finally sobers Jordan up, and he takes the seconds he should be taking to think that over and absorb it before he finally nods. “How many are you taking with you?”

“Well, for that exact reason, I don’t think I should have more than one more guard on top of you,” John says. “They’re used to seeing me and you, let’s not change that too fast. But we might be able to squeeze in more trips, so see if you can get people ready for rotations. Is Haigh going to make trouble over that?”

Jordan makes a face. He wants to deny it, but thankfully, his professionalism’s been engaged now, so he’s not just going to make wild promises to John. “Let me get back to you on that. He’s been all over the place lately. One second he’s shaking us down for extra pints of moonshine, next he’s asking whether we want in on the officer’s cuts. Not sure what’s eating him, but something is. But he doesn’t know we’ve been in and out, I’ll swear to that.”

“Well, keep it that way,” John says, and goes off to arrange his end at the kitchen.

* * *

“I think saying we almost killed each other is exaggerating it some,” Chris says.

Allison makes a face at her father. “Well, with all the flailing around, I didn’t get a good look. Were you trying to throw him on the bed or out the window?”

John opens his mouth, shuts it, and then opens it again, because he needs to do that in order to eat, and right now, the food’s about all that’s making sense to him. “ _That’s_ what you’re going to say?”

The pair of them look at each other, and then Chris clears his throat and attempts to look less pride-pricked. “Look, I got sloppy,” he says. “I’ll admit that. But we knew you and Parrish were—”

“Where the hell are you going when you’re not in here?” John asks, putting his spoon down. He thinks he sees a mulish expression start coming over Allison’s face, just like how Stiles looks when he thinks John’s going to stop him from doing the right thing just because _rules_ , Dad, and can’t help an aggravated noise. “Listen. I know I said I didn’t want to know. And I know I haven’t been asking, and that’s on me, but if you’re crawling all over the place and spying on things and you’re going to use it to—”

“We aren’t going to use it to get you in trouble, and anyway, if you did, what else could they do? You’re already all the way out here,” Allison says sharply.

Her father hisses under her breath and nudges her under the table, or something like that, because she’s starting to shoot him a dirty look when John speaks. “Well, yeah, so what’s left is they could execute me.”

Allison looks back right away, her eyes wide with disbelief. “What, but—you need a trial first, and we’d speak up if it wasn’t you.”

“This is a border garrison, Allison,” Chris says, quietly but firmly. He catches John’s eye and shifts uncomfortably in place before dropping his gaze to his bowl. “Commanders have a lot more leeway to drop requirements like trials if they think it’s an emergency.”

At least he realizes the stakes at hand, John thinks, and then something about how Chris is avoiding looking him in the face keeps John from fully relaxing. It’s just how methodical it is as if Chris is less ashamed and more…adjusting some plans. And John _just_ got done straightening Jordan out and sometimes, John swears, his life is just stopping one stupid idea after another.

“Anyway, the bigger concern is, _since_ we’re so isolated that the commander’s got the power to do that, everybody’s always on edge here. People already feel as if they’ve been abandoned and nobody up in the capital gives a damn about what happens to them, and that’s a bad state of mind if you ever want to work with them later.” John tears off a fresh piece of bread from the loaf he brought and then offers it around as an excuse to get both of them to raise their chins and look him in the eye. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but if you had to sneak into here under a bunch of rotten potatoes, I’m not seeing how it could possibly be something you can do on your own. And if you need help, it’s a lot better to not scare it before you ask.”

Allison’s still a little defiant, but that’s young pride for you, not used to swallowing down for the greater good. That said, it’s fading from her face a lot quicker than John would’ve guessed, given how old she is, and she does seem to be listening, even if she still looks like she wants to argue it a bit. On the other hand, Chris doesn’t look surprised in the least by what John’s saying, and while he’s old enough to know better, his calmness also keeps making John think he’s already figured all of this into his ideas.

“We’re here for the revenants,” Allison says suddenly. Her eyes widen again and she glances at Chris, but he gives her a little tip of the head and she takes a deep breath and goes on. “We heard about them, and Dad said he’d told you…anyway, our family’s always known they were real, and when we came and saw it was true, they really were back—we know how important it is to stop them. We were going to go to the capital, but when you said it wouldn’t do any good, we decided we should stay where we do have a chance to make a difference.”

“We were keeping an ear out to see how things were, but we aren’t going out to meddle on purpose,” Chris adds. Once he’s got his piece, he takes the remaining bread from John and sets it down on the table. He keeps his eyes on John for all of that. “Just trying to figure out who’s who. Didn’t want to make you more enemies, or lose you any friends.”

“Thanks, appreciate it,” John mutters.

They eat in silence for a little longer. It’s awkward. Once or twice Allison inhales like she’d like to say something, but she’s too nervous to do it, and it’s such a change from the friendliness John’s gotten used to that he starts to feel guilty about it. He does understand why they’re doing what they’re doing; the part that keeps him nervous is why they keep seeming to do it around _him_.

“Keeping you under wraps in here isn’t going to work that much longer, but I just need some more time to build up enough credit to get you in publicly,” John finally says, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “Thomas is a lot easier to bring around than Lahey, but you have to catch him when he isn’t pulling his hair out.”

Allison perks up dramatically. “Oh, are we going to be your servants for real?”

She sounds excited enough that John can’t help giving her a strange look, seeing as even people without a hunter background don’t normally get so enthusiastic over that sort of thing. Sure, a job is a job, with all the usual potential benefits, but it’s no fun adventure.

“What you were telling Lahey,” Chris breaks in, looking as if he’s thinking the same thing. “It would be an easy explanation. You’re short a cook, you found one, and—”

“That’s a spare cook, not a servant, because head cooks in this size garrison don’t get their own household,” John points out. “And seeing as we’re getting in less and less food, it’s hard to say we need more cooks. I said that because that’s all I could think of right then, but I need to come up with something better.”

“And we’ll be even more careful till you do,” Allison says, looking solemnly at him. She starts to get up and clear the plates, but pauses as she takes his. “We’re not here to ruin you. I can give you my word on that.”

She’s off with the dishes before John can reply to her. He starts to reach out and then puts his arm on the table, realizing he’s too slow for that too. It still feels strange to have somebody looking after him; he and Stiles divided things up more or less equally, just varying it depending on who was likely to be home when a chore needed to get done.

Well, except for the cooking. Stiles handled all of that. Wasn’t that fancy a cook himself, but he took to it better than John ever did or has. And admittedly was probably supplementing by stealing from the kitchen and John’s at the point where remembering that means when Chris clears his throat, it catches John in the middle of a nostalgic smile.

He tries to wipe that off his face as the other man waits on him, realizing that’s not going to look right when he’s gazing after the man’s daughter. “Something else?”

“You’re going out for supplies,” Chris says. He doesn’t look offended. If anything, he still looks as if he’s worried about John going off on him and Allison. “You mentioned it earlier.”

“Oh. Yeah. I got permission to take Jordan and another guard who Jordan says is at least open to the idea of revenants. It sounds like the reports are getting closer so it’s a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone,” John says. Since the dishes are all gone, he folds up the table and pushes that against the wall with the stools, and then gets the water pitcher to wash off his face and hands before he gets ready for bed. “Tricky part is, we’re going to be gone the whole day.”

Chris nods. “The reports he’s heard, any of them talk about villagers trying to lure revenants?”

John stops where he is. “What?”

He’s loud. Allison’s washing the dishes in the next room—she’ll put out the waste-water for John to dump so she doesn’t have to risk running to the toilet—and her scrubbing slows down. Chris doesn’t exactly flinch, but he’s pretty deliberately slow as he moves to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Look, the reason Allison and me were in that wagon,” he starts. He pushes the heels of his hands against his knees, then slouches to drop his elbows onto his lap. He’s uncomfortable remembering it, and the discomfort’s tinged with fear. Quiet fear, but fear nonetheless. “Not everybody out here minds the revenants the way you’d expect. The traders, sure, they don’t want it—but the people who never liked being ruled from the other side of the mountain anyway, and there’s still more of them around than you’d think.”

“I think I’ve been out here longer than you think, saying that,” John says dryly, but he gestures for Chris to go on. “I heard you can’t control them just by tying animals out in the woods for them.”

Chris grimaces. “No, you can’t, but that doesn’t stop idiots. Anyway, we were going around trying to find the root of it all—nobody’s even paying us, it’s just that we _know_ what happens if you let things go. We know how bad it could get.”

“And you found a village that didn’t like you doing that,” John guesses. “The one you were—well, no, they put you in the wagon, didn’t they?”

“They’re on the main road, they’ve got more to lose if the traders stop, so no, they were helping us,” Chris says, confirming it. He rubs his elbows up and down his thighs, looking up at John. “It’s not like anybody here is that well-armed. One good show of force would cow them.”

John raises his brows. “Except where are you going to get that show?”

Chris lets out a little sigh and dips his shoulder and flips one hand, acknowledging it for the daydream it is. “Anyway, why I’m bringing it up…if you’re going out, take Allison with you. She can poke around where you can’t, and she also knows what’s a good or a bad vegetable.”

“I thought you were going to suggest yourself,” John says after a second.

“Yeah, well, if you’re out for a full day, who’s watching the kitchen? You’ve had your promotion for less than a month,” Chris says. He’s using a mild tone like they’re just discussing it, but the way he holds John’s stare isn’t remotely retiring. And neither is how he shrugs and raises one hand to run through his hair, even if he’s dropping his eyes then. “I’m not saying anything should be done, just saying I think somebody should be keeping an ear out. And if there’s a slip-up like with Parrish, I can handle it easier than Allison.”

“I hope when you say ‘easier,’ you mean you can come up with excuses that don’t end in another body in a wine-barrel,” John says slowly.

Chris looks startled. Then starts to smooth out his face, but he realizes John’s already noticed. “That your only condition?”

“I’m not thrilled, but I can see the sense in it. Besides, I’m already talking about going behind the officers’ backs, so there’s no point in doing a half-assed job of it,” John says. Which is all true, and the only part that’s missing is that he also thinks if he says no, they’re going to do an end-run around him anyway. But he knows from his son that there’s really no point in calling that out beforehand; he’s not even going to feel that great about predicting it, with the mess he always ends up cleaning up afterward. “All right, but she’s coming out with us the way I want to do it. If I know about it, then I’m going to be the one directing things.”

“Fair enough,” Chris says. “I’ll talk to her, and then just let us know how we’re doing it.”

John nods and then, feeling a greasy film on his forearms, he puts the pitcher down and decides to make the trip to the washroom for a full shower. One of the few perks the garrison has was being built on top of a strong mountain spring, and whoever was its engineer, they did a proper job with the plumbing. The heating system’s broken down so the water is always cold, but it’s clean and plentiful, and anyway, sometimes what knotted-up muscles need is a good, long, chilly blast.

Sometimes that’s what John’s mind needs too. In the middle of rinsing the suds out of his hair, he stops and leans one hand against the wall, and thinks that he’s basically leading the start of a mutiny in the garrison. Never mind Lahey, it’s going to end up beyond the kitchen at some point, and that’s just the best-case scenario for making sure all the people who’ve gone out of their way to help him don’t suffer for it.

This wasn’t ever part of his career plans. On the other hand, he thinks, people _feeding_ revenants. And he knows the commander well enough, he knows exactly how much help he’ll get from that corner.

In all honesty, he thinks as he finishes up his shower, what he’s most worried about isn’t getting executed. It’s how he’s going to explain all of this to Stiles.

When John gets back to his rooms, Chris isn’t there, but he can hear the man talking with Allison in the other room. And a few minutes later, Chris steps back in, only to pull up short with his hand going back to the door.

“Can you get this damn thing open?” John asks, struggling with a tin of burn salve. “My hands are too wet—”

And he loses it as he turns towards Chris, the tin just squirting through his hands. Chris still looks startled but he snags it out of the air like a cat swatting down a fly. He turns it absently in his hand, looking at John. Then shakes himself, gives it a wipe on his shirt and easily pops it open.

“Thanks.” John leans over and gets a dollop, and then smears it over the raw pink stripe running across his waist. He’d leaned against a hot griddle without thinking, and while it’s not a bad enough burn to bandage over, it is annoyingly positioned where his waistband keeps rubbing up over it.

Chris nods without saying anything. He stands there for another second, looking at the burn. Then he puts the tin down on the windowsill where John can get at it and moves over. At first John thinks the man’s going to bed, but then Chris drops to his knees and reaches under the bed, and gets out a fresh set of clothes for John.

“So you know where everything is now?” John can’t help asking.

The back of Chris’ neck goes a little pink. John can see his clothes being fluffed, and then Chris swivels around without getting off his knees, raising yet another jealous twinge at how ageless the man’s joints seem to be. “It’s not exactly a big place, and we are actually in here most of the time,” he says, looking up at John. Somehow he’s keeping the blush out of his face. “We tried.”

“Yeah, look, I get you’re human and all. Just…if you’re going to fix things, stick to the clothes,” John sighs.

“I talked to Allison about your sword,” Chris says, wincing. He glances at John, then gets up and sits on the bed. He still has John’s clothes, and holds them out one garment at a time so John can dress. “I’m sorry about that. She meant well, but she should know on sight—that kind of thing. I taught her—I _thought_ I taught her better.”

John drops his towel in the laundry bag and then pulls on his clothes. It gives him a moment to collect his thoughts, so when he finally looks at Chris again, he genuinely isn’t upset. “I’m not supposed to still have that. Jordan’s a friend, but…anyway, just keep it to him.”

Chris nods. For a second John thinks that contemplative look goes over his face, but he’s also rolling out of the way as John gets on the bed, so maybe it’s just the way the light moves over him. Anyway, he doesn’t say anything else before John blows out the lantern.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chastel is the family name of the man who actually killed the alleged Beast of Gévaudan.
> 
> In a lot of places, even after firearms were introduced, officers were given and still wore ceremonial swords.
> 
> Yes, hot and cold running water was possible before modern plumbing. The ancient Minoans managed it before the ancient Romans, even.


	5. Chapter 5

When they go out on a supply run, the wagon doesn’t have much in it besides empty baskets and crates. And since no matter how trustworthy Jordan thinks his fellow guardsmen are, John wants to keep the number of people who know about Chris and Allison down, they have to hide Allison in such a way that they don’t have to let the other guard in on it. So figuring out how to do it is tricky.

John ends up putting what he claims is a barrel of salt on the wagon, just in case they get so much meat they have to start salting it right away. He’s betting that they _won’t_ , since the game’s been getting sparser and sparser in the region, and salt’s too precious for the guard to think of randomly playing around with it. Or at least that they’ll be able to let Allison out at the village before they pick up meat or more salt.

He’s right, but that doesn’t mean it’s not nerve-wracking. Jordan at least does a good job of keeping his fellow guard moving off the wagon, with the two of them circling into the woods on either side of the road for any unusual signs, and later when they get to the village, going around and trying to chat up people. Still, when John gets the lid off and pulls Allison out, he’s not ashamed to let out a huge sigh of relief.

“You’re not really putting salt in here, are you?” she asks once she’s dusted herself off. “It’s leaky, I can see daylight through the staves. All the salt would wash out.”

“Well, I guess that’s why we don’t have any in there to begin with,” John mutters. He glances around the corner, where the headman’s talking to some underlings, then points the headman out when they aren’t looking his and Allison’s way. “He says he’s got cabbage and a little corn, and we’re arguing over pork.”

Allison frowns. “It’s a little late for cabbage now, are you sure it hasn’t all gone to flow—never mind, I’ll check it out. When do I need to be back?”

John glances at the sky. “To be on the safe side, two hours,” he says, indicating the angle where the sun should be then. “This isn’t our only stop.”

She doesn’t think that’s enough time, that’s clear, but she just sighs and slips off, hugging the building shadows. The headman’s coming back over and John braces himself to argue some more about prices and starving villagers versus starving garrison. They’ll go back and forth about who has it worse and agree to something just so that the headman doesn’t have to deal with the commander face-to-face, and John will feel slightly less guilty about strong-arming villagers when he knows they have valid complaints.

It goes relatively smoothly, for all that John’s got more people to worry about this time. Jordan minds his friend and Allison gets back when she’s supposed to, and then they move onto the next village and that’s when it all goes wrong.

Not because of the villagers, who according to Jordan are scared to death of having a run-in with the monsters they’ve been hearing about, but because Jordan’s sergeant randomly rides into town to join them.

“I have no idea,” is all Jordan manages to say, before Haigh dismounts and comes over to them, wearing a suspiciously broad smile. Then he has to snap to attention. “Sir! Orders?”

“No, you’re still on kitchen detail with Stilinski here,” Haigh says dismissively, just looking at John. “Just go back to whatever trash work he had you doing.”

“Something from the commander, sir?” John asks. “If it’s the potatoes, I left a batch for the kitchen to warm up for him. Won’t be quite as good as fresh, but I ran it by the quartermaster and he said that that’d be fine.”

Haigh shakes his head and keeps on walking towards the one tavern in the place. He’s clearly expecting John to follow him, even though John hasn’t closed negotiations with the headman. When John looks over, Jordan shrugs helplessly, while his fellow guard nervously chews his lip.

“Carry out what’s there, and if any of it doesn’t look good to you, don’t put it on the wagon,” John says to Jordan. He raises his hand over the headman’s protests. “I’ll be right back out to talk over that, so just put it to the side till I can get to it. Oh, and Jordan—the salt.”

“Yeah?” Jordan says, going alert. “You want me to roll it over and scoop myself, make sure we’re not shorted?”

“That…that sounds fine,” John says. In a hurry, because Haigh’s stopped in the doorway and is looking impatiently back at him. “Wait for me, don’t make any calls.”

The tavern’s emptied out, and when John ducks inside, Haigh is banging his fist on a table and hollering for somebody to bring him a mug. He keeps at it till a maid shows up, curtsies in acknowledgement, and then runs right back out. Then he turns around.

“Sorry, if I’d heard you, would’ve ordered for you too,” Haigh says.

“I’m all right,” John says warily. “So what can I do for you?”

Haigh grins. “Good, this isn’t going to be messy. First off, you can keep from even trying to pass off the horseshit Lahey was selling as any good. Second, you can wipe that look off your face like you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know all you cooks are in on it.”

John shuts his mouth, and then rearranges his face to look as neutral as possible while he retroactively erases any remaining guilt he feels over Lahey’s demise. “There a third?”

“Yeah. Stop holding back and start distributing again, and I won’t tell the commander that you’re keeping a whore in your room,” Haigh says. He shoves his face into John’s face, chin and bad breath first. Then laughs and turns around and drops onto the nearest stool. “Young one, too, I never would’ve pegged somebody with the size stick up your ass for that, but if you can get it, why not?”

It takes several seconds just for John to wrap his head around what Haigh even means. In hindsight—disgusting as the man is, John can see how things would add up that way, without too much of a stretch. But it’s just—not—what John does. Who he is. Even with what he’s doing now.

“Oh, come on, Stilinski. Everybody knows your kid was keeping house for you, and then he ran off, but now you’re showing up with your shirts mended and somebody’s hanging your laundry out when I know you’re cooking up the good commander’s potatoes,” Haigh says conversationally.

The barmaid comes back with a brimming mug of beer and a wooden board containing some bread and a crock of butter. She starts upon seeing John, apologizing and saying she’ll be right back with more, and then flees before John can decline.

“He’s not a whore,” John says. He sits down across from Haigh, pretending he doesn’t notice the other man’s suddenly gap-mouthed expression. “Not sure about your eyesight there, but he’s definitely not young either. He’s just some beggar who wouldn’t stop following me on my last run, and he does chores for me for scraps. If he offends you that much, well, I’ll just go back and throw him out again.”

Haigh stares at him for nearly a minute. Then snorts and picks up his mug. Downs a good quarter of the beer, slopping it down his chin and onto the table, and then bangs the mug down and reaches for the bread. The man doesn’t bother with the butter, just greedily crams it into his mouth as fast as he can.

“Nice try,” he mumbles through the bread. “But when I started getting suspicious, I figured keeping an eye on Parrish would give me a clue, and yep, I saw _her_ with him. You know, if you didn’t waste your goods on a cocky young shit like him and paid attention to his betters, maybe we wouldn’t even have had to have this talk. You know?”

John presses his lips together and looks at the wooden serving board. Then at the mug. Then at the board again, judging how thick and sturdy it is. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

“Well, good. Then you’re not going to make any trouble,” Haigh says. He stuffs the last of the bread into his mouth, then starts to get up with bits still poking out of his lips. He takes his mug with him and he’s got it half-raised to his mouth when his eyes suddenly widen.

At the same time, John hears a woman’s scream rise from the back of the building, where the maid had gone. John grabs the board and spins around—Haigh’s stumbling back, banging the table forward as he goes so it hits John and almost pitches him into the next table over. The man’s making garbled, gibbering, fearful noises and between that distraction and nearly falling, John almost misses the dark figure looming up in the corner of the room.

It’s a revenant. Manlike except for its ash-gray color and huge size, so tall it’s doubled over under the rafters, though that doesn’t seem to hamper the swing of its powerful-looking arms. No _face_ , and even though John was expecting that, it’s a different thing to see what that actually means in the flesh. It’s so unnerving that for a moment he’s frozen.

Then the revenant moves and John snaps out of it. He hurls the board at the revenant’s head and then dives for the side of the room. The board’s not salted and he knows it won’t kill it, but he’s hoping the blow will stun or distract the revenant for long enough that he can run past it into the kitchen, where he’ll be able to find salt or fire.

He makes it, but barely—his coat’s torn half-off him and he feels a glancing icy touch down his back. Then he’s in the kitchen, and looking at Allison. She’s got the terrified maid and another woman behind her in a corner, hissing at them; she looks up at John, then flings her arm out to point at the hearth.

John twists around so he’ll be facing the revenant if it comes in, then grabs a poker from the wall and a rag from the counter. The revenant _is_ coming after him, and as its shoulders barge through the doorway, he yanks the rag into a knot around the end of the poker. Then shoves that into the fire to catch, and just as the revenant wrenches itself through the doorway, he heaves up the poker and thrusts it straight into the thing’s head.

It…it just seems to fold up, like a fallen shirt. It’s so fast that the rag burns through and the pieces slide down the poker, so John has to drop it before he gets scorched, and by the time the poker hits the floor, the thing is a headless lump right next to it.

“Oh. Oh, good, that was—that was perfect,” Allison gasps. She tells the women to just wait and then comes over to look at the…the corpse. “Good, but we need to build a pyre and burn it up, just to be safe—”

“I thought they don’t come out during the day,” John hisses. “What is it _doing_ here?”

“It’s the new moon, they’re strongest now,” Allison tells him. Then she looks from him to the women. “Listen, I’ll—I was talking to them anyway, I’ll get them started on the pyre, but I think you should go get Jordan and what’s his name, and when we get back Dad and I can tell you more. But we need to clean this up.”

“Clean—” John suddenly remembers Haigh “— _shit_. I mean yes, stay back here, do _not_ come near me unless—tell you what, I’ll send Jordan to get you. But don’t come otherwise, got it?”

Now it’s Allison’s turn to look strangely at him. But she doesn’t press now, just nods shortly and goes back to the women. John grabs up the poker again and edges around the dead revenant as quick as he can, then runs back into the other room.

“I think he’s dead!” says the headman.

John slows down. The headman’s kneeling by something on the floor, but John can’t see what it is because of the tables in the way. He’s still getting around them when Jordan blows into the room from the village square, gasping for breath, and when Jordan sees what it is, his eyes widen and he takes a step back. Then straightens up, one hand to the side of his head.

“Damn,” he says. He tilts his head. “What’s in his mouth?”

“Bread?” the headman says doubtfully.

“Did he choke?” Jordan says, and then he looks up at John.

Who shrugs. “I was in the kitchen,” John says, completely truthfully.

Jordan scratches the side of his head again. “Well, I don’t think we can do anything for him now,” he says, as John finally gets around and sees the headman shaking what seems like an endless amount of half-chewed bread out of Haigh’s mouth. “I guess we…actually, do we have to take him back with us? Won’t that spoil all the food?”

Haigh’s dead. Pop-eyed, face brutally flushed and still twisted up in terror, and limp as a ragdoll when the headman finally drops him. “Well, we’re not keeping him,” the headman snaps. “For all we know, that’s what brought that thing here! Maybe you all are what they’re after.”

“And I just killed it?” John says irritably. The headman looks up, surprised, and John sighs and points towards the kitchen with the poker. “Go look for yourself. And then come back, and let’s discuss the food and this and also, how to protect yourselves, all right?”

The headman blinks a few times, then gets up and does as John says. His fit of temper aside, he seems like he might be reasonable. John hopes, anyway. If they can keep the village from rising up against them out of sheer panic, he’ll consider it a good day.

“Wow,” Jordan says, looking down at Haigh. “Well, that’s…not how I thought he’d go. Bread. Huh. So what were you two talking about?”

“Shit,” John sighs. Never mind, there is _no way_ this is going to be a good day.

* * *

“We have to burn it here, and as soon as possible,” Allison explains patiently. Hiding her from the other guard is more of a hassle than a help at this point, so John has her working with Jordan and his friend as he wraps up with the headman. “I know you want proof to show the others, but the thing is, they’re going to keep up soaking the life out of things. They’re not moving around anymore, but you leave them lying around and you’ll kill anything growing in that spot. And any living thing that touches it could get hurt.”

“Okay, but can’t we even take a bone? One of those nails? Something?” Jordan asks. “Just something to prove we aren’t making this all up.”

“I can’t take you back to the garrison with me without the commander’s permission,” John tells the headman. “I’m sorry, I would if I could, but if I show up with you, he’ll throw you out. No, worse than that, he’ll probably confiscate your belongings and _then_ throw you out, and you’ll be worse off than if you stayed here and fought.”

Allison sighs. “They all drain life, so no. The only way—we could cover a piece in salt. But I don’t think we have enough. You really have to pack it thick to make sure it’ll be powerless.”

Jordan and the guard look at each other. “Let’s…just get back to you on that,” Jordan says. “Just, till we do, can you hold back a hand or something? Go ahead and burn the rest, I’ll throw it on myself, but just give me a chance, all right?”

The headman is being surprisingly reasonable about everything, though from the way he settles into his disgusted look, it’s not because he understands so much as because he’s gotten used to not expecting better. “Fight, right. We’re villagers. And on top of not doing anything, you people are keeping half the salt that comes through the passes for yourself, so where are we supposed to get enough to draw a fence around us?”

“If we had the salt, I’d give you some, but we honestly don’t. I’ve been in the storage rooms and I’m not lying to you,” John says.

“Well, you were telling the truth about that thing,” the headman says after a moment. He looks amused at John’s surprise. “And word spreads, you’ve been asking about them for months, and that’s longer than I’ve been putting any stock in the rumors…still, I have to take care of my people.”

John presses his hand over his face. “I know. I know…look, they don’t come in the daytime most of the month. It’s just the…”

He looks over at Allison, who’s wandered over now that she doesn’t have to deal with the two guards. “The new moon and the two days afterward,” she supplies. “So it’s just the rest of today.”

“It’s getting late anyway,” John says. He glances over at the bonfire the villagers are building up, then looks at the headman again. “We’ll stay the night. Help you keep watch, and we’ll do what we can to train you for now. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do right now.”

“That’s pretty pathetic,” the headman says, but he sounds resigned. “All right, fine. One night and then we’ll let you run back to your fort.”

“Thanks,” John says. He means it sincerely. Still, he doesn’t feel like that much less of a parasite, watching the headman walk off to brief the villagers.

* * *

No more revenants show up, but they’re too busy all that night for John to get any time alone with Jordan or Allison, and the long trudge home the next morning is spent getting the four of them to nail down the details of their explanation for their delay and a _dead sergeant_. Part of why it takes so long is that Jordan actually did talk the villagers into giving up enough salt to pack two of the revenant’s fingers, so he wants to tell the commander about revenants right off the bat.

“We have the evidence!” he insists. “He can’t ignore actual body parts!”

Interestingly, Allison is very vocally opposed. “And when he asks you how you know, what are you going to do, try them out on him? As if that’s not going to get us all thrown in jail.”

“You’re not coming up anyway,” John reminds her. “As soon as we get close enough, you’re getting out of sight, and then going back to your father.” 

Allison’s eyes narrow a little, but then she gives John a smile and climbs back in with the rest of the provisions. Not that there’s much, seeing as the headman’s taken the stance that if they have to fight off revenants without the garrison’s help, he needs more food reserves, but there’s enough that John can claim with a straight face that they’re not coming back empty-handed.

“Still think we could’ve buried Haigh back there,” Jordan says, climbing onto the driver’s seat with John. “I know what you’re going to say, then we wouldn’t be able to prove anything we tell them. But think about it for a second. Does anybody even know Haigh came out after us?”

“He’s been gone overnight now, I think they would’ve realized nobody was kicking people out of bed,” says the other guard.

“Yeah, but so he went out. So what’s to say he went out in the same direction as us? He could’ve gone a bunch of other ways, and we just told the only other people who’ve seen him to not come anywhere near the garrison,” Jordan says, turning and making a face at the other man. He drums his fingers against the wagon and then snaps them. “So he ran off, and there aren’t any signs of him. And in the meantime, we’ve run into a real revenant and we brought back proof—”

John sighs. “You brought back two fingers. Correct me if I’m wrong, Allison, but that’s not enough to do anything to anybody fast enough that it’ll seem dangerous.”

“That’s what I said, and now you can’t use that salt for cooking, and that _is_ a lot of salt,” Allison says.

“Well, so don’t tell me you’re just going to march up and confess that Haigh choked to death while you were busy killing a thing that’s not even supposed to exist,” Jordan scoffs. He glances at John, then drops his face into his hand. “Listen, I know you have standards, and it’s good to—I’m not saying we should turn into—”

“It killed Haigh, that’s what I’m going to say,” John snaps, just fed up with all of the cross-talk. Try all he can to lay down the groundwork, go over the details, carefully build it out so that nobody catches them in the contradictions that always lead to things unraveling, and they just keep insisting on tangents. Sometimes he wants to tell people he avoids lying not because he’s really that big on morals, but because it’s just a lot easier to not fuck up when you stick to the truth.

It’s quiet in the wagon for a good few minutes. John takes a few deep breaths, maneuvers the oxen around a rock in the road, and then looks up to find the other three eyeing him a little oddly. They’re not…wary, except maybe for Allison, but even with her, that’s tempered with…interest? Curiosity? It’s not quite that innocent.

“He doesn’t look like what a revenant does to a person,” Allison says after a moment. “And if a revenant had really killed him, we wouldn’t be able to bring the body back.”

“Yeah, I know. And you know, but the commander doesn’t know,” John says. “And look, normally I’d say getting people confused about how revenants work is a bad way to start, but right now the more important point is getting the commander to believe this is dangerous to _us_.”

“Also, getting rid of questions about what happened to Haigh. I hate to say this, but legendary undead creature probably is better than he freaked out at exactly the right time to get a chunk of bread stuck in his throat,” Jordan says in a musing tone. He drums his fingers against the wagon again, then frowns. “But about what he was doing out here in the first place—”

John shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know, didn’t trust me to do as good a job as Lahey, figured he’d see if the cooks were withholding food, because he hates your guts…I don’t think the commander’s really going to care which.”

“True.” Jordan lifts his hand, pauses, and then lowers it. “No, that’s covered with the…okay. Okay. I think we got it.”

“Yeah. Just stick to it, and if you don’t know, you don’t know because you weren’t there,” John tells them. “Do me a favor and let me do the talking, all right?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Jordan says, smartass that he is.

John lets it go because they’re getting near the point where Allison has to hide again. In the back of his mind, he is idly wondering who’s going to get promoted up to fill Haigh’s spot, but he doesn’t really think it’s a priority. That’s on the guard side of things, not staff, and he’s been told enough times that that side is no longer his problem, he’s not questioning it.

* * *

“So these revenants, you called them,” the commander says, staring at Haigh’s body. He keeps swallowing roughly and then hardening his expression, as if that convinces anybody that he isn’t rattled. “They come out of nowhere, and you have no idea what’s attracting them.”

“Well, no, we know they’re following the road. That’s what the villagers are saying, sir,” John says. He gestures towards the jar holding the severed fingers and the commander grimaces, then waves for John to cap it and put it away. “We don’t know how far up they’ve gotten, but I think if we go up and down the road and ask each village, it won’t take that long to map it—”

The commander suddenly whirls on his heel, bearing down on John with a furious expression. At least, it’s probably intended to look furious, but with how pale he is, he looks sick more than anything. “And how are we supposed to do that? With as few men as we have, which means I already don’t have anybody I can spare?”

“Or we send word that villagers who’ve seen revenants come up here, and when they come in, we can ask them what they’ve seen,” John says. “Seeing as they have more food than we do, it’s also a way to save us a few supply runs.”

“Well, and then what do we do with them once they’re here?” the commander demands. He spins around again and then sweeps out his arm towards a spot on the wall where the plaster’s fallen away. “Does this dump look like it’s equipped to be a refugee camp? We’re barely surviving on what we get when the capital remembers we’re here!”

John resists the urge to point out that maybe, if the garrison had acted like it remembered where it was a little earlier, they’d have better relations with the surrounding villages and wouldn’t have to rely on erratic handouts from the other side of the pass. “We need to protect the pass, sir,” he limits himself to saying. “If we’re attacked and driven out, we can’t do that.”

“Yes, I _did_ know that.” The commander stalks around the table on which Haigh’s body is lying, raking at his hair and mumbling to himself. Then he lashes out and kicks the table leg, and then glowers as Haigh’s hand bounces with the jiggling till it falls off the edge. “And _this_ moron just had to go out without leave, as if the men need more bad influences. Didn’t even say why, no, he just _waltzed_ through the gates like personal business can just be conducted whenever he wants…he’s just as bad as that drunk who had your job before.”

The commander snaps his fingers, looks expectantly at John, and then snaps them again. At that point John realizes the man is waiting for him serve up a prompt. “His name was Lahey, sir.”

“Right. Useless excuse for a cook…and now I’ve got _another_ cook telling me how to run my garrison,” the commander mutters.

He gives John a vicious enough look that John reconsiders taking on the explaining instead of having Jordan do it—but then again, Jordan would insist on focusing on the revenant and probably would’ve lost patience with where the conversation’s going now, and just lost his temper. Which would be the right reaction, since the commander’s troubles are, frankly, his _job_ , and he’s just whining when there is an actual problem to be solved, but even when he was captain of the palace guard, John didn’t make the mistake of thinking that telling superiors they needed a better attitude was going to work.

John just prepares to wait out the commander’s ranting and then slip in his recommendations, like he’d do with any other semi-to-fully incompetent senior officer. And while that doesn’t land him in chains and on short rations like a yelling Jordan certainly would’ve gotten, it does mean he’s maybe a little slow to pick up on the commander’s segue to thoughtful.

“Must feel a little more like home for you now?” the commander suddenly says. When John looks at him, he smiles and shakes his head. “The military side. You weren’t trained as a cook, after all.”

And even with John’s experience and battle-hardened temper, it stings. “No, sir.”

“Well, we’re short-handed, and you seem to want this problem. So it’s yours. I’ll tell Thomas to start sending all his requests to you, including whatever we need to bury Haigh here,” the commander snaps. He starts towards the door, then stops. Half-turns and holds up his hand. “Oh, and I’ll still be expecting my gratin, Stilinski. Everybody’s taking on extra loads and you’re not going to be an exception just because of your prior record. Which got you out here, anyway.”

“Sir,” John says, just barely keeping himself from hissing it. He’s actually glad he has to bend his head, since then he doesn’t have to try to look serene about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Revenants are a very broad category of undead that can cover everything from zombies to vampires, depending on which cultural tradition you're looking at, but something that stays pretty consistent is that you have to destroy the body in order to fully remove the threat. Fire is usually considered a good idea.


	6. Chapter 6

John might be getting screwed over, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He also has more leeway now, and he’s damn well going to use it. So when Thomas comes bumbling through the doorway, still shell-shocked, he thumps the man on the back to knock him out of the dry heaves he gets upon seeing Haigh’s corpse and then steers him into the hallway.

“We know there’s no traffic coming down from the capital so I’m cutting patrols on that side of the wall. The men can shift over to going out on supply runs, which I’m doubling. And if we don’t have the money to buy food, we can do some light work for the villages and get it in kind. Dig ditches, build fences,” John says, continuing to walk Thomas down the hall. Every time the man tries to speak up, he gives Thomas a squeeze and then talks louder. He doesn’t feel _great_ about it, but on the other hand, he really doesn’t need to go into the accounting right now; he knows it’s not going to be in their favor. It hasn’t been in their favor since any of them got staffed out here. “Payroll’s not for another few months, if it comes at all next time. So we need to keep the men happy, just like you said, and we do that by feeding them better and wearing them out so they don’t have time to think about being discontented. All right?”

They get to the end of the hall. John stops but loosens his grip so that Thomas almost walks out of it, and then he grabs the man’s arm to spin him back so they’re facing each other. Thomas blinks up at him, mouth slightly open, a squeamish look on his face.

“He promoted you,” Thomas says. He grimaces and pulls out a handkerchief and mops at his forehead, and then sighs. “And you’re not wasting time about it, are you?”

At least John doesn’t have to remind the man they’re equally ranked now. Thomas is caving, that’s written into the slump of his shoulders and the defeated squint on his face. “No, but look, I’m a lot more reasonable than Haigh. Let me take care of the guards and I’ll let you take care of the accounts. I won’t pester you about them.”

“Well, the commander still will,” Thomas mutters, his eyes shifting to either side of John. “As if anybody’s going to audit them…all right, fine, you front-liners never want to listen anyway. Anything else?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m hiring a cook,” John says. He frowns and thinks for a second. “And a housekeeper. They’re cheap, the housekeeper’s the cook’s daughter, but I need them because if the commander wants that potato dish—”

Thomas rolls his eyes. “Fine, whatever, _I_ don’t care so long as we don’t get killed. Have your cook and your housekeeper, just keep whatever did that to Haigh _out_. Understand?”

“I think we’re on the same page, yeah,” John says, and goes off to let Chris and Allison know.

He finds them both in his rooms, along with Jordan. Allison’s more than happy to take the revenant fingers off John’s hands and over to the barracks to teach the guards proper disposal, and she in turn drags Jordan out of there before he can do more than look gleefully at John. Jordan clearly thinks that all of their problems have been solved by John’s latest promotion, and John makes a note to himself to head over later and disabuse Jordan of that idea before he does something stupid, like announce to the whole guard that they’re going on a campaign against the revenants.

But first, John’s got something to run by Chris. “I need you to look at something for me.”

“I was just going to head back to the kitchen,” Chris says. He’s turned around and pulling out something from under the bed: a handful of sheets that have obviously been scavenged from around the garrison, with how much they vary in size and shape. “Things were pretty quiet while you were out, just a lot of speculation about why you’re so stupid about going out now that you can stay in and loaf around and not get exposed to—oh.”

John finishes pulling his shirt over his head, and just catches Chris wiping an odd look off his face. The man’s startled but there’s something else to it, an interest in being startled that is swiftly followed by an expression so blank it looks like it hurts.

“On my back,” John says, turning and gesturing. “I think it might’ve touched me, and it’s felt a little numb ever—”

“ _Oh_ ,” Chris says, and his face comes back alive with concern. He stoops down and braces one hand on his knee, peering at John’s back as John awkwardly tries to point where the spot is.

It’s more of a line, running from just above his waist and near his spine up towards one of his shoulderblades, and from the way Chris grimaces, he hasn’t just been imagining it. “It’s not bleeding.”

“No, but that’s not what they do,” Chris mutters. He reaches out but doesn’t actually touch John. Instead he just traces out the stripe, hand going up and then back down, the light heat coming off his fingertips a sharp contrast to the cool non-feeling where the revenant had grazed John. “Not that deep…did you show Allison?”

John shakes his head. He almost asks why Chris would even ask that, and then realizes if it sounds that defensive in his head, then it’ll be even worse out of his mouth, and anyway he doesn’t have to defend—and Chris is probably just wondering why he wouldn’t consult with the other person who could help him. “It wasn’t bothering me that much and we were busy. I figured it’d go away, but it’s been almost a day now and I can still feel it.”

Chris steps back, still stooped over and peering at John’s back. “Well, it’ll fade over time, but there’s a tisane that will speed it up.”

“Do we have the stuff for that?” John says, turning around. “Herbs go into a tisane, right? And what, tea? I know we don’t have tea, and it’s been a couple days since I was in there, but I don’t think we’ve got anything but salt and pepper. Maybe a dried chili pepper somewhere.”

“We’ve got a little bit more than that. Not much, but I can see what we can do with it,” Chris says.

John frowns and starts shuffling his shirt back onto his arms, watching the other man straighten up. “Well, where did that come from? I wasn’t joking, the cupboards really are—”

“Yeah, but I cleaned out Lahey’s rooms while you were out, and he had a pretty sizable stash of goodies,” Chris says. He pauses and cocks his head at John’s cut-off exclamation. “I only took what shouldn’t have been in there. Quartermaster hadn’t gotten around to it yet, so I figured somebody should.”

“Right, somebody would get around to it,” John says, suddenly realizing what must have set off Haigh. No doubt he’d had the same idea, but had checked Lahey’s room after Chris had gone through it, and then assumed that John had beaten him there.

Chris had been coming off almost amused at John, but John must sound strange because now the man backs up with a wary look on his face. He stops, waits for John to focus on him, and then goes slowly over to the door to Stiles’ room. He’s keeping both hands in sight and keeping his back away from John.

“I’ve got it all in here. I would have put them back where they should’ve been instead of waiting for you, except I wasn’t sure…” he starts.

“Yeah. Yeah, I mean, no, that was common sense. If you’d just refilled the storage rooms, the rest of them probably would have filched it before we could get it down on record,” John mutters. Then he shakes himself and waves Chris off before Chris goes through the trouble of opening the door. “We should go over it before we turn it over to Thomas too. He’s not as bad as the rest of them, but he takes his skim.”

“Oh, I already did that,” Chris says. More relaxed, he just drops his back against the door and then shuffles through that bunch of papers he pulled from under the bed till he finds one he holds up for John to see. “Inventoried it all. Had to guess the weights, couldn’t sneak up the kitchen scale, but I guess if I’m public now, I can just redo that part. Shouldn’t take me more than an hour, and I’ve got to wait for the tisane to steep anyway.”

“Do I need that?” John asks. He throws his shirt back on and pulls it down just till his head’s free, and then shifts to tugging the sleeves straight. “It’s not really bothering me, and if it’s going away on its own…”

“It’d still help. It can flare up, if you’re under stress or you get hurt again—better to just clear it up as quick as you can,” Chris says. He cocks his head and looks John over, and suddenly he’s amused again. “It doesn’t taste awful, as tisanes go. You’re not going to have to dose it with rotgut or anything like that to get it down.”

John makes a face as he flaps down the shirt over his belly. “Sure, that’s what they always say.”

“I’ll go make a batch anyway. Stuff keeps, and with what you’re planning, we’ll want it on hand,” Chris says, and he’s outright smirking at John now. He drops it whenever John looks over, but John can catch it out of the corner of his eye. “It’s just about time to get them started on dinner, too.”

“Wait, what, you mean the cooks?” John says, hastily tucking in his shirt. Then he snags Chris just as the other man’s going by him. “Hold on, I’ll go down with you.”

Chris raises his brows. “Aren’t you supposed to be running a stealth campaign against revenants right now?”

“It’s—we’re teaching people what to look for and what to do if they see it, we’re still not going out there hunting ourselves,” John says. “I can’t push it that far, I’m still not the commander, and speaking of, I’m also still the head cook.”

“But you can’t cook,” Chris points out.

John sighs. Then, feeling Chris’ arm shift in his grip, he tightens that. “Okay, no, but I’m supposed to supervise them and they don’t even know who you are.”

“So I’ll introduce myself,” Chris says.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to do that?” John says. He sounds defensive and a little whiny, and he’s not sure why, considering that one, he’s got a legitimate concern, and two, this is all supposed to be his call anyway, legitimate or not. “What if they don’t believe—and don’t say anything about wine barrels.”

“I wasn’t going to, seeing as we’ve got better things to put in them,” Chris says, amused. He shakes off John’s grip but makes an effort to sober up. “Look, I’ve watched them, it’s not really what they believe in so much as what’ll save them the most trouble. You know that.”

Honestly, John can’t dispute that. On the other hand, he’s also not just going to ignore it when the math doesn’t add up. “So how are you saving them trouble?”

“Well, I cook a lot better than all of them, and if they listen to me, they’re going to get less complaints from the guards.” A little glint of humor is sneaking back into Chris’ eyes, though his mouth is still a thin, serious line. “I guess if they don’t, I’ll go call you, how about that?”

“Fine. Try it out, but I’ll come over as soon as I’m done addressing the guards,” John says.

“However you want it done,” Chris says agreeably. And then he stands there, holding his papers with one poked out a little like…John remembers what it is just as Chris jiggles it, a look of pretend-uncertainty on his face. “So did you want me to redo the inventory?”

“Fine, do that too,” John says, giving up. Sure, that’s exactly what Chris wants, but picking your battles and this is the man who’s making up some nasty herbal remedy for John to drink and supposedly get better, and John’s already got enough future headaches lined up right now. If Chris wants to terrify the cooks—because them terrifying Chris is _not_ on John’s mind—then they’re overdue for it anyway, and they’ll probably come out the better for it. “Just so long as nobody dies.”

Chris starts to look offended. “You remember it wasn’t intentional last time.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I said nobody dies, and not don’t kill anybody,” John mutters, giving him a hard stare.

John doesn’t exactly stare Chris down, but Chris shrugs an assent and that’s good enough for now. “All right, I need to go talk to the guards before Jordan gets them all worked up,” he tells Chris. “I’ll see you in the kitchen, and—oh, and thanks.”

He’s on his way out the door when he says that and that’s blocking his view of Chris when the other man says…whatever he says, John can’t make it out, except that it sounds surprised. John ducks back around the door, but Chris just looks at him like he’s the one who should be explaining. So John sighs and then heads off to try and be a leader.

* * *

John is not fond of making speeches.

He’s not fond of the leadership approach where you intimidate people into following you out of fear, either. Anyway, while letting an idiot pick a fight had worked with the cooks, that was less a matter of fear and more a matter of correcting their impression of him from months of silently swallowing Lahey’s bullshit. Once they’d figured out they were all on the same level, at the least, they settled down. Guards, on the other hand, can’t look at their officers as being equals—that’s just not how the chain of command works. But it’s stupid to give people trained to stab other people in the back a reason to test those skills out on you.

What John ends up doing is telling them in plain terms what a revenant is and does, and that seeing as they can’t formally go out and take care of it, since the commander will never approve that, they’re going to informally spread the word so the locals can take care of it. And telling them that as long as they stick to a couple rules about it, he can explain what they’re doing to the commander. They’re not dumb, just cooped-up and bored and frustrated, and unlike John and the commander, they’ve all been recruited from the surrounding area so those are their home villages John’s talking about teaching.

It goes over pretty well, John thinks. There were enough mutters and snorted asides about the commander that John will have to keep an ear to the ground, since all-out revolt isn’t something he wants to use to test just _how_ disconnected they are from the capital now, but overall he thinks the activity will do more to settle the men than stir them up.

The kitchen, on the other hand…the kitchen is quiet. Very quiet.

“Redid the inventory, and we’re bottling the tisane and putting it up over there,” Chris says, pointing to a shelf behind his head. He’s elbow-deep in some kind of dough, while all around him, cooks move with a lack of bellyaching, arguing, sloppiness…just generally a lot more efficient, even compared to the few weeks John was directly managing them. Especially compared to that. “I’m making enough, just every guard going out should be able to take a flask with them. Then we’ll run out of ingredients, but if we’re sending out supply runs more often, I’ll make you a list of what to ask for—”

“This is for the whole—for all of our supplies,” John says, looking at the sheet of paper lying on the counter next to Chris.

Chris whacks down the lump of dough, grunting, and then molds it back into a ball. He dumps it in a bowl and drapes a damp towel over that, and then uses another damp towel to wipe off his hands. “Yeah, I started putting stuff away and thought I might as well get the totals fixed while I was at it. There isn’t much overall.”

John makes a face as he carefully folds up the paper. The cooks are avidly listening in, he notices, although every time Chris starts to move one hand their way, they hurriedly return to what they’d been doing. Even if he doesn’t look over.

“You know we have a whole officer just for inventory,” John mutters under his breath.

“Yeah, but his records needed to be corrected too,” is Chris’ bland answer. At least he takes his cue from John and lowers his voice. “He came by. I introduced myself. Took a look. He did offer.”

John opens his mouth. Then shuts it. Looks around for an excuse and sees the empty pan they use for the commander’s gratin. “You didn’t start this yet?” he says, picking up. Chris starts to say something about he’s got everything waiting in the backroom and John nods and puts his hand on Chris’ shoulder and steers them towards the hall. “Good, let’s have a look, make sure it’s all up to the commander’s standards.”

Chris doesn’t resist, and when they’re safely behind the shut door, he goes and…starts slicing potatoes on the mandolin he’s dug up from somewhere; maybe Lahey was hoarding equipment as well as food. “Well, I do need to get it started while you’re saying whatever you need to,” he says, just as John’s getting over that flash of incredulity. “I guess we’re still pretending you make it?”

“Yeah, that seems best,” John says. He works his mouth some, then catches himself rubbing at the side of his face. “Don’t you—”

“Oh, forgot,” Chris says, and puts down a potato to pull out a small bottle. He pushes it across the table towards John. “Drink that now, and I’ll get you another one before you turn in, and that should clear it up. But you’re going to want a big bottle like the rest of them when you go out.”

“I—right. Fine.” John takes the bottle, which isn’t much bigger than his hand, and uncorks it. Gives it a sniff and it’s…got that musty smell apothecaries always have, but it’s not already bringing the bile up in his throat. “Listen, about—that and this—and unless I’m getting something wrong, you’re acting like you’re just going to be running the kitchen here.”

Chris looks up with an expression of muted surprise. “I’m your cook. Aren’t I? Allison’s got the skills too, but she doesn’t know so many recipes so it did seem to make more sense to have her be the housekeeper—”

“I was just saying that!” John hisses. “I didn’t actually—I wasn’t actually planning on that. Honestly, are you thinking your daughter’s going to do my laundry now?”

“Well, she was already doing that,” Chris says, blinking. He shrugs a little at John’s dropped jaw. “You don’t seem like you’ve got the time to check what the washers are doing with it, judging by the stains and scorches they were sending back. She got upset about how they were treating you and she didn’t have anything else to do. I figured it was good for us learning the basement layout.”

“Right, but now we’re sending teams out and we’re going to run up against revenants again, sooner or later,” John says after a long pause, during which he tries to determine whether Chris is really that calm or whether the man’s possibly insane. “She’s more useful going out and helping the guards learn what to do.”

Chris nods. “She’ll be happy with that, and she can handle herself around them, so that shouldn’t be a concern.”

“I made it clear to everybody that mistreating her is going to come straight back up to me, and I will deal personally with one responsible,” John says. Haigh’s words come to mind, even though he’s expecting that and tries to grimace them before they can surface.

He rubs at his face again, and then looks up to see Chris watching him closely. “I appreciate that, and so will she,” Chris says, slower, more sober. He shakes off a slice that’s stuck to the mandolin, then puts that down. Looks at it and then back up at John. “Like I said, she can take care of herself, but as her father, I do feel better when she doesn’t have to.”

“Yeah,” John says. He’s never really gotten comfortable with this part of the job, dealing with the families, and he fiddles with the bottle. Almost tips it over, and when he curses and grabs it up, he’s so flustered that he just downs the contents without thinking.

It tastes…so it’s not the worst. He’s still not going to be looking forward to that nighttime dose, he thinks, and looks up just as Chris smiles at him, more sympathetic than amused.

Chris startles a little upon being caught out, and then has to make a visible effort to compose himself. John watches all of that curiously, then remembers he actually had a point to make. “Well, so wouldn’t you be out with them too?” he says. “We need whatever we can put out there, out there.”

“But you can’t cook,” Chris says.

They stare at each other. Without looking down, Chris grabs a double handful of potato slices and dumps them into a bowl with the dressing.

“Are you—are you actually saying you think it’s more important for you to stay in the kitchen?” John eventually manages to squeeze out. Disbelief’s got him grunting it and he swallows to get some moisture in his throat, and gets an echo-taste of the herbal stuff. He makes a face and then gestures at Chris. “You’re gonna stay in and _cook_?”

“Well, you didn’t say I was your beater or anything like that,” Chris says, mixing up potatoes with one hand. “You said I was your cook. And you need one since you—”

“Can’t, yeah, I heard you the—actually, I knew that already, I never _said_ it was something I was good at,” John says. He puts his hands against the edge of the table and pushes back on them, then looks up at Chris. “You’re making fun of me.”

Chris’ brows twitch, the only giveaway in his otherwise neutral face. “Listen, if you’re out there not actually hunting revenants while in here, you’ve got a commander who didn’t actually tell you to do that—”

“He said handle it,” John says.

“He said it was your problem now, not that you can handle it and do whatever he wants and he’ll back you up on it,” Chris says. He uses his wrists to tilt the bowl and glances into it, then sticks his hands back into the potato mixture and keeps tossing. “The point is, who’s keeping an eye on things here?”

Somehow, John thinks, he really should have seen that coming. And it all makes sense, and he can’t really fault Chris for bringing it up, but…he’s irked anyway. “An ex-hunter I don’t really know?”

“We’ve been sharing a bed for how long now?” Chris says.

John stares at him for a good minute, and in that whole time, Chris’ relaxed, faintly exasperated expression doesn’t slip once. The man is _good_.

What irks John the most, he decides, is that he really doesn’t want to be irked at the man. And with all the other ridiculous things that he used to disapprove of, at the _least_ , and that he’s now not only sanctioning but initiating, he just…he really isn’t who he used to be. Sure, that’s obvious but it just—he just didn’t quite think it straight out like that before.

“Look,” Chris says, finally starting to show a little worry. “I’m just trying to make sure everything is covered, and the doors will be open when you come back. You’ve got Allison and as long as people listen to her, she should be able to run whatever teams you send out.”

“Yeah,” John says. He scratches at the side of his face and wonders where he’s even going to find the time to deal with this, considering that _revenants_ are out there. And then he wonders whether he has to even deal with it, and _then_ he decides he just won’t. Which will probably blow up in his face later, but…later sounds pretty good right now. “Yeah, I know. _And_ you’re making fun of me.”

Chris pauses and looks a little more closely at John. His mouth twitches as if he’s amused, but a flash of irritation goes through his eyes, as if maybe he’s having a little bit of John’s problem where he can’t help himself, even though he knows that’s a risk he doesn’t have to and shouldn’t take.

“I swear on the head of my daughter that I’m not going to depose the commander or otherwise take over this garrison, how’s that?” Chris finally says. He pulls his hands out of the potatoes and clamps the bowl between his wrists to scoot it towards the waiting pan. “I’ll also do my best to not get you promoted any further. I think that covers everything.”

“Just…you know you’re not actually my cook, right?” John sighs. The argument was lost before he even started it, if he’s honest with himself. Situation’s too urgent, they’re too short-handed and he doesn’t have any other realistic choices. And…well, he does trust Chris, despite barely knowing him. If that gets John killed, he’ll accept it; he had his chances and he knows what he’s doing, not taking them.

Chris looks up in surprise from where he’s started laying the potatoes in the pan. “Well, whatever you want to say,” he says, shrugging. “It’s your explanation.”

“I still—” _think you’re making fun of me_ , John almost says. He doesn’t because that’s just going to start the conversation in another circle and he needs to get out of the damn spiral he’s already in. He shakes his head, then heads for the door. “Right. Let me know when dinner’s ready.”

“I’ll call you,” Chris agrees, continuing to lay potatoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mental subtitle for this story might be something along the lines of, "The one where Chris woos John with kitchen competence and backchat."
> 
> A beater, in the European formal hunting tradition, is a servant who scares out game so it runs towards the hunters.


	7. Chapter 7

After that, things go reasonbly well. The commander retreats into his rooms to fire off a bunch of letters to the capital about how ill-supported they are and how neglectful the bureaucracy’s been, and only comes out for food and the odd rant at John about making sure the men aren’t getting sloppy with their uniforms. Seeing as nobody’s calling for parade any time soon, John just nods through it and lets Chris know the commander is going to need an extra helping of potatoes.

Thomas is around a little bit more, but he actively avoids anything to do with revenants—out of fear he’ll be required to go out with them, it seems—and mostly hangs around the kitchen to inventory the new supplies they’re bringing in. Though that’s still a trickle, and Chris always hands him a revised inventory at the end of any day they receive something, whereupon, John’s been reliably told, he just produces a sickly little smile and throws away his list. Anyway, it keeps him out of John’s way and paper’s one thing they aren’t short on.

“I think we actually are getting somewhere now, with these trips out,” Jordan says to John after the third one.

He and John have taken to meeting at the end of each day in the barracks. They use Haigh’s old rooms, which were cleaned out of anything personal, but which don’t have to be turned over to anybody else. John _could_ have switched over, he supposes; they’re twice as large as his current rooms. But they’re also farther from the kitchen and even if Chris is keeping the cooks quiet, John still thinks trouble’s more likely to come from there than the guards, who’ve all fallen into line now that they actually have something to work on.

Lahey’s rooms are free too but John just…he feels weird taking anything from either dead man, even if he wasn’t a willing cause of their death. Call him superstitious, but then, he’s talking with Jordan precisely because some superstitions come true. “More sightings?” he asks.

“Not only that, but they’re pretty sure they nailed one,” Jordan says, swinging his legs up onto a crate. “Didn’t find a body, but they did find this patch of…sorry, wasn’t sure how long you’d be down there.”

Allison comes in, making a face at Jordan, and then hands John a cloth-wrapped plate. She’s got a hunk of bread in her other hand, and as outrage slowly spreads over Jordan’s face, she sits down on another crate and smiles sweetly at him. “Dad just wanted to make sure he ate,” she says, nodding at John. “We’re supposed to look after _him_.”

“Anyway. As I was saying, before I was so crudely told to get my own stowaway household.” Jordan narrows his eyes at her, but he stays sprawled down as he was. And ignores John when John rolls his eyes and offers some of the steamed vegetables, so apparently, Jordan’s not that hungry. “They found this patch of black stuff that they said was the thing’s blood. Don’t worry, scooped up the dirt and tossed it on a fire and everything, but even if it didn’t take the revenant down for good, it’s been good for morale. Word’s spreading that you _can_ hurt them.”

“They’re all still asking why can’t the guards at least stay out in the villages, if we aren’t allowed to let people into the garrison,” Allison says, frowning. She doesn’t eat her bread, just squeezes it between her fingers. “I don’t _think_ it’s going to boil over, but it’s hard to explain. We’re asking them to tell us what’s going on but we can’t promise we’ll come out to respond if they do.”

“That’s not our call,” Jordan says, looking back towards John. “Overnights are commander-only decisions, unless it’s an emergency. We’re doing the best we can, which is a hell of a lot better than what we were doing before.”

Allison looks irritated with him. “I’m not saying we aren’t trying. I’m just saying it’s hard for them to understand.”

“Well, the guard gets it, anyway,” Jordan mutters, using his heels to rock his crate. When the crate unexpectedly drops with a loud thud, making Allison start, he smiles insincerely at her.

He’s not stupid, he understands perfectly well what Allison is saying—he’s even said versions of the same himself to John in private. And John appreciates the public show of loyalty, but one, they’re not in public, the three of them have this regular meeting precisely so they can hash things out before John issues an order. Two, that was just juvenile, so John treats it like he would any idiot prank and kicks the crate out from under Jordan’s feet. Then he drops his plate on his lap and reaches over to thump Jordan straight when the man, yelping, almost teeters off his seat.

“I know, but either we get the commander to come around or we figure out how to deal with the revenants during day trips,” John says.

Jordan rights himself, giving both John and a smirking Allison betrayed looks. Then he shrugs off the annoyance and gets back to business. “We couldn’t switch to night-only runs, could we? It’s still the same amount of time, just out at dusk and in at dawn. Some of the guards are getting…anxious, let’s put it that way. It’s not that they don’t believe the revenants are out there but I think _they_ could use a chance to see they can hurt these things too.”

“You’re looking at me like you don’t already know the answer to that,” John says dryly. “Commander’s still the same, and I’m not sure why you think he listens to me more now than when I was just the cook who knew how to make his potatoes.”

A dogged spark of hope goes through Jordan’s eyes, but his shoulders are slumping. “Well, just checking,” he mutters. “Lot of things have happened lately, like your promotion. You never said just what you said to him to get it, anyway.”

“So about convincing him,” Allison breaks in, while aiming a surreptitious kick at Jordan’s ankle. “Dad and I were talking it over, and we were thinking it might help if he had the impression the revenants are blocking the way over the pass. Then he’d have no choice to go out and fight, if only so he can run later.”

“But they’re not on that side of the mountains, they’re on this side,” John says, and then he looks sharply at her. “And I hope you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”

Jordan rolls his eyes. “We don’t have enough salt to waste on packing a whole one, I know, I know, I heard you both before.”

“And that doesn’t work when they’re _alive_ anyway,” Allison says. She gives Jordan another annoyed look and he jerks his legs away, then realizes she hadn’t even made a move towards him. Looking pleased, Allison brushes crumbs off her knees. “No, we weren’t thinking about sneaking one around to the other side of the fort. We were thinking if he got a message that payroll wasn’t coming anymore, it’d force him to go out and see what’s going on.”

“Oh,” Jordan says. He sits up and assumes a thoughtful face. Then he puts his hand out in front of him and silently ticks something off on his fingers. “Well, it’s not likely to come in suddenly and prove us wrong, I’m pretty sure about that.”

“But that could upset other people, not just him—look, I’ll think about it, but I don’t want to jump too fast on this. It might look like we’re doing well, but some—a lot of that, that’s down to us getting lucky. You can’t count on that,” John says. He leans forward and stares at both of them till they give him reluctant nods—he has to come back to Allison because her first one comes too fast and too easily to be believable—and then settles with his plate. “Okay. So now that that’s out of the way, can we get back to my question? How do we deal with what’s just in front of us right now?”

“Okay,” Allison says. She looks like she’s thinking it over, and _not_ thinking over the whole commander issue, but there’s just a little bit of poise to how she’s doing it that makes John eye her. “I can go back to Dad and talk about whether maybe there’s a way to temporarily hold them, just long enough that we can kill one. We’ve been working on repelling them, but we could do a pit trap, something like that. It’ll just have to be really deep to keep them from climbing out.”

Jordan shrugs. “Guess we’ll just have to flex those rusty siege skills of ours.”

He also has calmed down way too quickly for John to completely buy it, but since he’s being constructive, John decides to let it go for now. Anyway, John figures, neither of them can do anything on their own, and by the time they get broader support for whatever they’re planning, John should have heard something. When he’s got more details, then he’ll deal with it.

* * *

“You at least get why I’m concerned, right?” John asks Chris later, when they’ve turned in for the night.

He probably should have done this when the lantern was still burning, because now he’s just got to go on the tone of Chris’ voice. But Allison was in their room up almost till he and Chris crawled into bed, wanting to go over trapdoor plans with her father, and John didn’t want to go over things again in front of her. Besides, John supposes that having Chris’ face visible wouldn’t give him that many more clues to the man’s feelings.

“Commander’s still the legitimate leader here, and it’s one thing to act beyond your authority because he’s not bothering to shut you down, while it’s another to outright overthrow him. Yeah, I get it,” Chris says, sounding understanding without giving away which way his sympathies might be leaning. “Whipping and demotion and jail versus hanging, if I remember right.”

Then again, maybe John doesn’t need those extra clues if the man’s going to do him the dubious favor of mouthing off. He rolls over onto his side, facing Chris, and then grabs Chris’ shoulder as the other man starts to move like he’s getting up. “Versus a goddamn _war_ if he gets away and runs back to the capital,” John hisses. “Listen, I took the demotion to come out here because I still wanted to make sure problems got taken care of, even if I had to figure out how to do it as a cook who don’t say it, I _know_. I didn’t come out here so I could stew over it and then go on some ego trip that’ll end up killing a bunch of people.”

Chris’ shoulder shifts under his hand, then pulls back. He holds onto it, but it turns out that Chris is just turning onto his side too, and John ends up having his hand trapped under Chris’ ear. “And I gave you _my_ word,” he says, tone edged with irritation. “We aren’t here to mess things up for you.”

“Yeah, well, says who?” John mutters.

“Chris Argent. I did tell you that,” Chris snaps back. They both breathe for a second, heavy and rough, and then Chris’ breathing slows into a sigh. His head rolls off of John’s hand. “You’re taking all the people who’d want to do anything with you when you go out. There’s nobody here to work with anyway.”

“Which is why you always stay back.” That’s a good point, and John had half-forgotten about it, and anyway, he feels reasonably confident that Chris isn’t as quick off the trigger as his daughter might be. So now he feels a bit guilty for pressing the man, even if it was necessary.

“I’d say why, but you just told me not to,” Chris says dryly. He doesn’t sound like he’s holding a grudge. He even snorts and gives John an absent pat when John, withdrawing, accidentally bangs his knee into Chris’ hip. “Just, if you can dig up any nutmeg, it’d be handy.”

“Nutmeg,” John mutters. “Okay.”

Chris gives him a few seconds and then pats him again. “Allison can tell you what it looks like.”

John does his best to swallow the annoyed grumble that rises in his throat, because he is not a petty man, or one whose pride gets injured because he genuinely doesn’t know something and somebody’s trying to teach him. He tries hard, and then jams his face into his pillow to muffle the part that he can’t hold back on.

“So you had a choice between here and there?” Chris asks.

“What?” John says, lifting his head.

A little silence passes before Chris explains himself, and it’s awkward enough that John half-thinks Chris might just drop it. “You said you took the demotion,” he finally says.

“Oh, yeah. That.” The tight way Chris sounds now, he obviously thinks he’s treading on eggshells. John’s a little puzzled—not because he can’t understand why Chris would be so wary, because he does, but because he really doesn’t feel that mad about it anymore. Sure, there are some things he misses about the capital, and life here still isn’t ideal, and he has no idea what his son is up to…but he’s finally able to take action and that goes a long way. “I was getting exiled one way or the other, I pissed off too many people, but they did…Stiles was younger then, so they offered us both exile here, or I could keep him in the capital till he finished school if I agreed to go work on withdrawing the army.”

“You two wanted to stay together,” Chris says.

John nods into his pillow. “Yeah. Yeah, that, Stiles wouldn’t even—he hit the roof and stole a bunch of books from the palace lib—anyway. It’s riskier here and I wasn’t thrilled about that for him, but being the guy ordering out troops from all the places we swore we’d protect…places we razed to the ground just a couple generations ago so they’d take that offer…it wasn’t going to make him safer in the long run anyway. And at least I’d see for myself what was going on here.”

“I didn’t really want to go to the capital to deal with the revenants either,” Chris says after a second. He shifts and from the way the bedsheets move, how his breath filters across to John’s face, John can tell they’re still facing each other. “More than not being sure they’d actually do anything—these things started out as weapons. The more people learn about them, the bigger the chance somebody will think about using them that way again, and that’s what my family—that’s not what I wanted to have happen. But it’s bad enough I just couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

“Well, you’re not heading for the capital now,” John points out.

“Yeah, well, no matter who’s running it, as long as this pass holds, I think there’s a chance,” Chris says. He seems about to go on, but then there’s just the sound of his teeth clicking against each other. Then his pillow rustles, and a second later, he tugs the bedsheets back up, apparently going to sleep.

John waits for a few more minutes, then shrugs and closes his eyes, too. That’s handled, he hopes.

* * *

Two days later, just as John’s coming into the fort, he’s told that the commander wants to see him immediately. And not by one of the handful of guards who stays back, or by a cook, but by an unnerved-looking quartermaster.

“What happened?” John says, climbing down from the wagon.

“He wants to see you right now,” Thomas repeats. Sweaty, eyes darting back and forth between John and…Allison, who’s one wagon back, helping Jordan unload.

John glances around the tops of the garrison walls, and the guards that he sees are paying more attention to the dead deer they managed to bag. He checks the obvious hiding places nearby and doesn’t see any tell-tale out-of-place shadows or anything like that, and his skin isn’t prickling like it would be if he had walked straight into an ambush.

He only feels uneasy when he looks at Thomas. The man’s always on edge and it wouldn’t be the first time that the commander’s sent him into a nervous fit, but something about the way he’s fidgeting right now doesn’t sit right with John. “Yeah, all right,” John says, stepping back. “Allison, can you pass me my bag?”

She looks up, frowning, since he’s going up against her wagon and not the one he’d just gotten off of. He catches her eye and then points to her bag, which has a couple knives and probably a scavenged crossbow, even if she hasn’t yet slipped up to let him actually see her with it. Her eyes slide over to Thomas, and then she nods and crosses the wagon-bed to get the bag for John. Steps on Jordan’s foot on the way, so he stops looking like he’s going to jump down and hit Thomas over the head with that cask he’s holding.

Thomas doesn’t seem to notice any of the byplay, that’s how nervous he is, and when John has his bag and starts after him, he outright flees to the door to the officer’s quarters before stopping himself. Even then, he’s gripping the doorway with white knuckles and John has to clear his throat before the man, starting, will lead him on.

“What’s the matter?” John asks as they walk down the hall.

“I told you,” Thomas blurts out, accusing and plaintive at the same time. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you to keep it quiet, but you couldn’t—couldn’t you just _hide_ them? Why did you have to—why would you—”

The blood in John’s veins suddenly goes cold. For a moment he thinks about running back and getting Allison and—he gets hold of himself. Makes himself take a breath, remember Jordan’s there with her, and there’s no way the guards are siding against them.

“Did somebody die?” he asks, as calmly as he can.

“Don’t be so cocky,” Thomas hisses at him. “You think just because he let you run things for a while, you’re the high-flying officer you used to be? You’re still just stuck out here, just like the rest of us, except at least we have a chance of getting home when you’ll just have to stay—”

They’re almost to the commander’s quarters. Rafael’s inside—there’s light coming out from under the door and occasionally a shadow sweeps across the crack, like somebody’s pacing in front of it. John’s slightly in front of Thomas so he gets to the door first, and tries the knob, but the commander always keeps it locked. He knows that; he just wants the rattle of the bolt.

Then he steps back, making room for Thomas as rapid footsteps approach the door. Thomas keeps going on about how he’d warned John, and John nods and slides the bag off his shoulder, tugging open the strings and putting his hand inside. The crossbow’s there, as expected. It’s not loaded—Allison stowed it properly, with the bowstring off and probably tucked somewhere on her—so John just grabs the end, and as the door opens, he swings it out and into the side of Thomas’ head, knocking the man squarely through the doorway.

Thomas’ arms come up and out, windmilling, and one of his hands smacks into the lintel. John curses and jerks forward, thinking that’ll keep the man from falling—but no, Thomas has lost his balance for good and he’s falling into the door hard enough to send it flinging wide open. A cry and a clatter from inside the room tells John the door’s caught somebody on that side.

John ducks through the doorway and hops over Thomas’ legs, wheeling around the edge of the door, trying to see who he’s hit. His foot comes down on something that rolls slightly and he grabs for the door to stay upright, and his view skews so instead of taking in what’s behind the door, it sweeps across the room to Chris, dried blood streaking down one side of his face, kneeling on the floor with his hands lashed in front of him to a table-leg. Chris’ shirt is crumpled next to him, and there’s a bright red welt curling around his ribcage, and the thing John just stepped on is a leather belt.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Stilinski?” snaps the commander.

He’s still on the floor. Empty-handed, thankfully, and his eyes widen as John pivots back to him with the crossbow in hand. 

“Don’t know yet, to be honest,” John says. He steps over Thomas, who’s limp but groaning, not completely out, and gives the man a hard nudge in the ribs with his boot-heel, not trying to break any bones but just warning him what’ll happen if he gets up. Then he gets his toe under the belt, flips it up into the air, and after he’s caught it, he tosses it to the far end of the room. “What were _you_ doing?”

Rafael stares hard at him. For all that the man’s turned into a bullying, over-strung and and under-concerned asshole, he’s not without brains, and once he had been shrewd enough to make it up to commander level before getting the post out here. So he thinks it over before answering John.

“That,” he says, slowly putting his arm out and pointing at Chris. “That is an _Argent_. And you—you—you’ve been _harboring_ him this entire time and you think you’re going to _fight_ the revenants? You _idiot_.”

John comes sideways into the room, crossing towards Chris without turning away from Rafael or Thomas. He checks that Rafael doesn’t have anything near or on him that could pass for a weapon, and then glances at Chris’ back—only a couple welts, so they weren’t at it for that long. “Well, I’m an idiot, so explain that to me, would you? Why am I an idiot?”

“This is mutiny,” Rafael says. He laughs sharply, but he’s sitting on the floor, not so much sprawled on it, clearly calming down. “I knew you were going to get there, nobody like you takes exile well, and of course you had to come down with a crusade in mind and you’re listening to one of _them_ , and I really thought you had some kind of good intention at the bottom of this, but—”

“My family fought the witch who made the first one,” Chris suddenly says. “That’s what he means. We fought her and we fought the revenants but we didn’t—we couldn’t get them all, so we had to seal them up and I didn’t say before because—”

“Well, because he’s obviously planned this and he’s unleashing them on us now, and this is all your plan to get your old job back, isn’t it?” Rafael shouts. “Trick me outside and let me be eaten and then take all the guards and march on the capital and—”

“Why the _hell_ would I want to do that?” John says. “Honestly, if I just wanted the men, I could’ve just poisoned your damn gratin and done that weeks ago. I don’t want to go back there to those assholes. Maybe you do, but I don’t.”

Cut off, Rafael just gapes at him, mouth twitching. Then the man suddenly bolts up onto his knees and John brings the crossbow around, but Rafael’s not trying to lunge. No, he’s jabbing his finger at something just beyond John’s current field of vision. He’s still speechless but he’s trying to talk, the odd scraping noise coming out of his open mouth, but something seems to be blocking him. His face is going red, he’s trying so hard—redder and redder and finally John starts to fear that the man’s choking.

“What—” John says.

“He’s—John, he’s—” Chris snaps, and John slips up and looks at him instead of Rafael.

John immediately whips back around, but is only in time to see Rafael’s foot disappearing in the hall, while Thomas, kicked hard in passing, whimpers and curls up into a ball in the doorway. And—well, fine, so John’s damn well mutinying now on top of everything. 

He throws himself towards the doorway and grabs Thomas’ arm, dragging the other man up onto his feet and into the hall. By then Rafael’s nearly to the end, and Thomas is trying to snake himself loose, crying for John to leave him out of it. Which John would like nothing better, but he’s not leaving the man in the same room as Chris so he hauls Thomas a few yards down, then drops him. Backtracks and yanks the door to Rafael’s quarters shut, and then keeps going to the window at that end of the hall.

Once the shutters are wrenched open, John climbs out onto the sill and peers down the side of the building. There will still be too many people at the front gates so he figures Rafael’s headed towards the back gate, and he’s proven right when he sees Rafael fleeing across the courtyard towards the kitchens.

John sucks in a breath, then jumps down to the lower roof of the next building over. Protest aches spike through his knees but he forces himself on, scrambling to the other side and then down via a stack of crates. A trio of bewildered cooks spill out of the kitchen, one of them with a fresh splatter of sauce on his front, and when John calls out to them, they whirl away from the door.

“He’s going to the back!” one cook calls back without prompting.

They’re so confused they don’t know what they’re doing, but the fact that they’re going to help John out when they’re like that—John will think about it later, when he’s not skidding through a clump of dropped dough. He gets down the length of the kitchen before careening off into a counter, rattling a rack of hanging pots. Grabs a large pot lid off the pegs, then pushes himself off and runs into the hallway to the storage rooms.

He'd gotten the lid out of blind instinct, just thinking he needed something in his other hand, never mind why he would, but the moment he comes around the corner, a carving knife comes whizzing at his head. John uses the lid to deflect it and ducks down, just glimpsing Rafael with a big butcher’s cleaver in one hand.

Then the other man disappears into one of the rooms. It’s the biggest of them, but most of it is filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves that are bolted into place, so they just rattle when Rafael throws his shoulder into them. John’s not sure if Rafael’s trying to tip them over onto him, or is just panicking that much, but either way, all it does is give John a great idea of where Rafael is in the room.

“I’m not trying to kill you!” John shouts as he races through the doorway. The room also has a back door, the only storage room that does, and if Rafael makes it there, he’ll only be a few yards from the back gate. “I don’t _want_ to kill you. Damn it, I’m just trying to—you know the revenants are real, you _know_ we can’t just leave them—”

“To hell with revenants!” Rafael snarls. “If I was supposed to handle them, I should’ve been sent the tools to do it with. I don’t want any part of this, and rest assured, when I get up and tell people what you’ve been up to—”

“Are they going to care? Really? Are they?” John slows down as he goes around the first bank of shelves. They’re empty enough that he can see part of Rafael’s head, but he can’t see the cleaver. “They aren’t even sending supplies anymore. And no official recall orders, and come to think of it, _you’d_ be mutinying if you tried to go back without one. So look, all you have to do is sit up there and eat your damned potatoes, and we’ll just—”

“They’re poisoned! I knew they tasted too good! Nothing from this place is any good, I knew it was a lie!” Rafael’s hysterical. He’s just not listening anymore, and in all honesty, John’s starting to think the man might have gone just a little bit insane. “I’m getting out! I’m not going to be part of this suicide mission of yours, I’m going! I’m going and you can’t stop me!”

John sees a flash of metal and dodges back behind the shelf. Nothing comes flying out at him, but Rafael’s continuing to edge down the aisle, and in a few more steps, he’ll be at the end and there will be two shelves between him and John. “You can’t go on _foot_ ,” John says. “Sure, to hell with revenants when they’re going to kill you if you sleep outside at night on your own. Would you just—”

“If you come one more step near me, I’ll take your head and bring it back with me!” Rafael screams. He bangs something against the shelf and glass shatters with that peculiar splat it makes when it’s filled with liquid. “I should’ve done that when I realized you had an Argent in here! I should’ve just killed him and handed your _cook’s_ head to you when you walked in, in those drugged potatoes you’ve been feeding me this whole time!”

“For—they’re _not_ drugged!” John snaps, swinging himself around the end of the shelf.

At the same time, a sharp thump comes from the back door to the storage room. John comes into Rafael’s aisle just in time to see the man start at the noise, slip on a slick of golden syrup pooling around his feet, and go over backwards. The cleaver whips out of Rafael’s hand, does a couple lazy pinwheels in the air, and then comes straight down on Rafael’s reddened, crazed-eyed, shouting face.

The shouting stops. John stops where he is, just a yard away. Whoever’s come in the other door stops for a few seconds.

Then they walk over, slow and hesitant, and Chris comes around the corner to look down at Rafael. He’s got rope burns on his wrists but no rope on him anywhere, and at some point he’s gotten hold of one of the guards’ swords.

“Did he…did he just fall like that?” Chris says after some staring. He points absently at the streaks at the side of the puddle that Rafael’s feet had made.

“Pretty much,” John says. He sighs and puts the pot lid down on a shelf, and then pinches the bridge of his nose. Takes a few deep breaths.

“John,” Chris says. “I should—”

“Clean this up, I need to find Thomas and then talk to the guards,” John says, turning on his heel.

Chris starts to call after him. He pretends he didn’t hear it and keeps walking, and Chris doesn’t try again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crossbows (or any other bow) aren't functional if the bowstring is too wet to effectively be tensioned, so back when they were actually regular army weapons, the soldiers would usually take the string off and store it in a waterproof place till just before the fighting started.


	8. Chapter 8

“I just want to leave,” Thomas says when John finds him, seated between two guards near the half-unloaded wagons and holding a cold compress to his forehead. “Whatever just—I don’t want to know. I don’t even want to know. I don’t want to know anything anymore, I don’t want to get involved. I just want out of here.”

“Which way are you planning to head?” John asks.

Behind him, Jordan stops in the middle of an eye-roll to look incredulously at John. Allison’s not around—probably went off to find her father—and so John has to do his own dirty work, stepping on Jordan’s foot as he goes around to the unloaded supplies and starts picking out this and that.

Thomas twists around, looking just as disbelieving. His mouth works a little bit and then he answers John in a rush, as if he thinks the moment he stops talking, John will take it all back. “I don’t care what happens here, and I don’t even want to be in the army anymore. I want to go home. I’m not capital-born like you and the commander and I just—I want to go home and set up a shop like my father and stay there.”

“Okay,” John says. He turns and looks Thomas over, the man shivering and biting his lip and trying not to break down into tears, and then he hands Thomas a piece of cheese. “Next caravan that comes through going that way, that’s fine. But I just need you to sign discharge papers and—”

“Fine, fine, anything, whatever you want,” Thomas says, clutching the cheese to himself like it’s a baby.

John sends him off to his rooms to start packing up, and then gathers around the guards to explain what’s happened and how things will be run going forward. He doesn’t make it elaborate, just says that the commander’s had a fatal accident and he’s in charge now, and he’ll draw up discharge papers for anyone who wants to leave like Thomas. He’s honest with them, telling them he has no idea when they can get the news to the capital and get orders back to finalize his latest promotion, and that the rank’s high enough that anything and everything he does is provisional until he’s confirmed.

He also says that he’s planning to stay here and sort out the revenant problem, and that while he doesn’t have a solution yet, he’s not going to wait till he hears from the capital to find one. The men don’t say anything while he’s talking, just shuffle in place some and then start looking at each other. At the end, John says that he’ll be in the map room if any of them want to talk to him. A murmur of assent ripples around the group then, but none of them make to follow him as he turns and walks away.

It’s not the most enthusiastic response, but then again, if they’d been cheering or anything like that, he’d wonder whether he and Allison and Jordan have been explaining what revenants are properly. If they’re thinking over everything seriously, and really considering their options, then John figures he’s done about all he can.

* * *

“Hey,” Jordan says, knocking on the doorway of the map room. When John looks over, he comes in and sets a plate of food and a filled mug on the edge of the table. “Nice speech.”

“Thanks,” John mutters, going back to the map.

Jordan watches for about a minute, then clears his throat. “So…they’re all sticking around. They want to keep helping.”

John pauses. “Good,” he finally says, letting his shoulders sink in relief.

“Allison wants to know when you’re done,” Jordan goes on. He scuffs his foot against the floor. “She wants to talk to you about something.”

“She can come up now if she wants,” John says.

“Well, sure, but she wants to know you ate something. It’s been a long time since lunch,” Jordan says. He’s trying too hard, and when John looks over again, he grimaces but manfully tries to meet John’s gaze. “Look, whatever happened…you still have to eat, right?”

John presses his lips together. He starts to reach for the plate, then takes his hand back and puts it on the map. Then he reaches for it again, but jerks his hand back almost immediately. He’s annoyed as hell and he knows it’s making Jordan curious—answers whether Jordan’s gotten any of the details—and also, he knows he just…is not good enough of an actor to just toss back the food so Jordan will go away.

“Did she and Chris talk yet?” John finally asks.

“I have no idea.” Jordan considers and rejects several different ways of continuing that before he finally settles on an overly-cooperative smile and a step back into the hall. “Want me to go ask?”

He takes John’s shrug as a yes and disappears. John straightens up too late to call the man back and then just…stands there and stares at the food. He’s not even hungry, John thinks, and right then his stomach pinches in on itself and growls and he sighs.

So when Chris suddenly appears in the doorway, John’s got a mouthful of roasted beets. John starts, then hurriedly gulps some water as he starts to choke, while Chris freezes like he regrets coming up here.

Then the man shakes it off and pushes into the room, with an expression like he’s got a knife to his own throat. “Listen, I was—Allison and I were planning to tell you. About our family, and knowing where these things came from, and…we trust you to really use that to wipe them out, and not to use it for anything else. It’s just…I thought it’d be better to wait till you were settled down into your new position. That was my call, not hers.”

John swallows some more water and then puts his mug down. Chris flinches slightly and keeps on the other side of the table, even though his hands are empty and showing above the table-top. He hurried up here from somewhere, probably the kitchen—he’s got a shirt on again, but the sleeves are shoved up to his elbows and the neck’s flapping open nearly to his navel.

“And the whole sealing—back then, they fought and fought and they came down to the last group of revenants but they were too tired, had lost too many people to take care of all of them, so what they did was they lured the things into an old salt mine and then collapsed it on them,” Chris goes on after a moment. He’s getting stiffer and stiffer, that easy composure of his flaking away with each word to show the anxiety underneath. “They always meant to go back, but it never happened and…and I think what happened was something must have opened up the mine again and let some of the revenants out, and then they made new ones.”

“So we can’t be sure we’ll get all of them till this mine is cleared out,” John says.

Chris flinches again, even though he seems relieved that John’s finally speaking. “Yeah,” he says, and he even starts fidgeting, scratching at the scabbed-over burns around his wrists. “Yeah, and I…have never been to this mine, but the directions were passed down in the family, and Allison and I were trying to find someone who could round up enough people for us to go there. It’s rough country even without the revenants—werewolves send their outcasts and youngsters who need to prove themselves over there. So…I’m—”

“What the hell were you doing?” John suddenly blurts out. He doesn’t really mean it as harshly as he sounds; he just has been sitting on the question for hours now, trying to figure out how to ask it, and now Chris is standing there and he can’t hold it back any longer.

“I’m sorry, I know, it’s been obvious for a while that you could be told, and I wasn’t trying to—to keep it secret just for secrecy’s sake,” Chris immediately says, looking pained. “We want to help peop—”

John shakes his head and then drops the calipers he’s been using. “No, not—” he pauses as Chris twitches sharply, even though the sound of the calipers hitting the table is barely audible “—I meant how did he _get_ you? What the hell were you doing up in—”

“Oh. Oh.” For a second Chris looks relieved. Then puzzled, and then that plus embarrassed. He rubs one of his wrists back against his belly, leaving a faint pink dot where his scabs are opening up. “Yeah. That…he came down because I was late sending up the gratin this time and I thought…he didn’t act like he recognized me, but I guess he did know about the Argents. He asked me to bring the gratin up and honestly, caught me off-guard. I was still getting free when you showed up. Sorry about that.”

“Getting…free,” John says.

Chris moves his shoulders slightly back and forth, and it gradually dawns on John that this is what the man looks like when he’s squirming. “Yeah, well, I told you I wouldn’t go after him, so I figured the easiest thing to do would be to just let him get in the whipping and then escape when he got tired. He wasn’t that great at it anyway, terrible swing.”

John opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it and lifts one hand, and then shakes his head and just puts that hand against the side of his head.

“Look, John, I just want it to be clear, I think what you’re doing is the right thing to do, and I want to help y—” Chris starts.

“Okay, come in,” John says.

Chris blinks, hesitates, and then takes a step into the room. When John points to a free stool, he slowly shuffles around towards it, but doesn’t sit on it.

“Stay put, I’ll be right back.” John gets halfway out of the door as Chris shoots another confused look at him, then stops and turns around. “Actually, eat some of that, would you? It’s getting cold.”

The kitchen’s too far, but there’s a closet just a few yards off where the officers keep their stashes and when John checks, it’s got bandages and a bottle of antiseptic wash. He takes those, gets a bucket of water from the washroom, and then comes back to find Chris perched on the stool and leaning over the plate of food like he’s never seen that kind of food before when John would bet the garrison he cooked it all himself.

Chris immediately straightens up, and then tries to get off the stool as John puts the bandages, bottle, and bucket down on the table. John pushes him back down by the shoulder, then keeps the hand there as he pulls up the back of Chris’ shirt and confirms that the man doesn’t appear to have dressed those injuries either. None of the welts have split, but they’ve bruised up and the skin stretched across the bruises looks so strained that it could break at the next touch.

“What are you doing?” Chris says. He’s pretty calm about the manhandling, just grimacing over his shoulder as John flips his shirt forward over his head.

“What do you think?” John mutters, reaching for the antiseptic wash. He douses a wad of gauze with it and then swipes it quickly over the bruising. “Listen, about this mine—great, we actually have a plan instead of this scattershot prevention we’ve been trying to do. And I get why you held that back, and appreciate that you’re trusting me now with that information. I’ll make sure it gets cleared out right this time.”

Chris pushes the shirt down off his head and starts to reply, only to hiss and grab at the edge of the table as John swabs at him. He slides off the stool enough to get one foot down, then has to stop because the table’s rocking so much. “You’re…you’re welcome,” he says, still sounding confused.

John steps back and looks over the welts, and decides he doesn’t want to bandage over them now. If they do bleed, he will, but they look so raw he’s not sure the bandages themselves wouldn’t rub them open. So he gets more wash on the gauze and then steps around Chris and grabs the nearest wrist to start cleaning it. “And Rafael—”

“What are you doing?” Chris asks again, staring at John lifts his arm and starts working on it.

“He actually got you when you weren’t looking?” John says.

Chris blinks. Tilts his head, and then his eyes narrow slightly behind the wrist John’s now bandaging. “I had a gratin in my hands. It’s a big pan. I had to use both hands.”

“Yeah, well, he wasn’t that light-footed,” John mutters. He finishes with that wrist and reaches for the other one, and has to tug some before Chris will let him pull it up to dress it. “And just because I said I didn’t want to get here over his dead bo—well, couldn’t you have just knocked him out? Were you honestly going to wait till he got done taking the skin off your back?”

“Wait a minute,” Chris says. “Wait, all right, you said—you made such a big deal about us not coming in and turning this place upside-down, and I was just trying to—you don’t trust me and if I was going to trust you enough to tell you family secrets, I wanted you to feel like you could trust me the same and—”

“I just didn’t want to mutiny for the hell of it!” John snaps. “But if other people are getting hurt and I could have stopped—I was exiled out here for getting in the way, couldn’t you figure out anything from that?”

Chris is annoyed now and it’s flashing in his eyes, turning their light grey into chips of mica. His brows come down and he stares at John, and then abruptly pulls his half-wrapped wrist from John’s grip.

“I’m supposed to read you,” he says, his voice rising with incredulity. “ _I’m_ supposed to read you. Are you kidding me?”

And then, just as John’s about to get that wrist back, he grabs John’s face between his hands and lurches off the stool into John, and kisses till John slams back against the wall.

John’s hands slap against the wall, then swing back around and find a…well, John’s not sure if ‘natural’ is the right word, but the way his fingers shape around Chris’ ass certainly is comfortable, and it’s even useful as Chris continues to press up against him, expertly working a tongue into his mouth. Lets John plant his elbows against the wall and use it for leverage, pushing up on Chris’ buttocks as the man straddles his thigh and then tries to hitch up it, as if he’s honestly going to climb John like the proverbial tree.

Something keeps fluttering against John’s neck as they rub up against each other: the unraveling bandage on Chris’ wrist. John reluctantly pries one hand off to bat at it, only to have the strip tangle on his fingers. He yanks without thinking and Chris’ arm comes down, hand slapping at John’s shoulder. Then Chris clutches at it, groaning, as John’s other hand gets worked around by the motion of their bodies and its fingertips begin to wedge up in between Chris’ buttocks.

“You asshole, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed as you for a couple months now and you’re—you just— _we_ didn’t leave when we had the chance, didn’t that tell _you_ something?” Chris gasps, peeling his head back.

“Kind of, but—look, I know I helped you but I wasn’t doing it for that, this, I mean, you know what I mean,” John says, more than a little breathless himself. “And there are revenants and people desperate enough to think appeasing them’s the best way to go, because the garrison’s been so useless, and I just—I don’t have a lot of time to think about that sort of thing.”

Chris stares at him, then suddenly grins. It’s broad and toothy and far more reckless than anything John’s seen on the man to date, and it’s so goddamn attractive that that alone makes John’s cock twitch.

“Well, so don’t think about it,” Chris says, just before he plunges back into John’s mouth.

At the same time, he hikes himself up so high that John thinks he might only have one foot on the ground. His arm swings around John’s neck for support and John grabs at him again—makes the mistake of touching his back. Chris jerks sharply, hissing into John’s mouth, but when John tries to pull away, see around him to see how bad the damage is, Chris grabs him by the jaw and pushes his head back into the kiss. Then takes that hand and takes it on a purposeful, pressing trip down John’s front, from shoulder to chest to belly and then worming into John’s trousers. Playing with the hairline, not getting down where John suddenly, badly, desperately needs the man’s hand. Just flirting with it, fingertips, and finally John shoves them off the wall and back towards the table.

Just in time he remembers Chris’ back again. He pulls them up short and Chris—drops his goddamn trousers. He can hear his belt slapping against the floor. He growls in irritation and Chris chuckles and licks the roof of his mouth, casual as you please, and John grabs handfuls of Chris’ shirt and yanks that up again.

Enough to get it over Chris’ head and trap his arms in it, and while he’s fighting to get free, John spins him around by the hips and bends him over the table so that by the time he’s out of the shirt, he’s grabbing onto the edge of the table and moaning as John runs his fingertips as lightly as possible along those welts.

“I should just wrap you to the damn bed, you’re gonna be that much of a fool,” John finds himself rambling, as he’s stripping Chris of his trousers. “Take a bunch of bandages and tie you where you aren’t going to pull shit like that, and just—”

“Fuck, fuck, sure, fine, just _fuck_ me first, for fucking—” Chris gasps as John palms the man’s buttocks, squeezes them together and humps his erection up against their surprisingly generous give “—fucking wanted to just roll over for weeks now—”

John doesn’t have the words for responding to that, so he just—looks for something. He’s not leaving the damn room again, and he’s still himself enough to think spit’s just—this man was going to take a _whipping_ for him, still has the marks from it, and John both hates looking at those and feels so disgustingly, deeply possessive of them, like in some weird way, they’re Chris telling him things—he doesn’t have the thought to work through that either. He just really, incredibly, badly, wants and needs to get himself into the other man.

Antiseptic will sting, ink will probably poison Chris even if it wasn’t watery and—butter. They sent a pat of butter up with the bread roll. He’ll take that.

“Is that—are you—” Chris groans, even though he’s rolling himself against the table “—really?”

“Well, you keep saying you’re my _cook_ ,” John grunts. 

His hands are so hot that the butter half-melts before he even touches Chris, and he’s hurrying to get the man worked open before it drips off his fingers. Chris is tight, and John can’t lean over him, kiss and suck the sweat off the back of that nape the way he wants to, not without putting pressure on Chris’ welts, so for a distraction he reaches around with his free hand and rubs up between Chris’ thighs.

Chris moans low and long and shoves himself back onto John’s fingers, so hard that John has to back up to get them back out. John ends up digging his nails into Chris’ leg to get him to hold still. Then into both of the man’s buttocks, holding them spread as he hitches in his cock an inch at a time, watching the sweat run off in rivulets around Chris’ straining shoulder-blades. He leaves a quilt of red half-crescents behind, sensitive enough that when he palms them, Chris rocks so roughly that he makes John stumble, have to grab the table to steady himself.

“Your cook, hell, I’d fucking scout for you, hunt for you, if you’d just…couldn’t fucking figure out what you were—were waiting for,” Chris pants. He’s already tired, just holding onto the table now instead of wrenching back against it, but every time John moves in him, his body rolls up into it like he’s being dragged back on a string. His breathing’s deep and hoarse but he makes begging noises if John slows down. “Didn’t know but hell with it, wasn’t—didn’t want—would wait—wait and see—what it was, I just—just wanted to _be_ there—”

“Hell if I know either, I was fed up with this place,” John mutters. He’s starting to lose control of himself, hunching over Chris, putting more of his weight on the other man than he should be—he jams down one elbow against the table and just keeps his head off Chris’ bruised back. “Just—I don’t know—Stiles was gone, maybe just—needed a—a—”

Chris shudders and it’s the most gorgeous thing John has ever seen, the way need just ripples down the man, bunching up his muscles, drawing his head and ass up, his hands scrabbling against the maps. His head thumps down on one cheek and his slitted eye stares up at John, exhausted but still wanting it, pleading for it, and John remembers to reach around, wrap a buttery hand around Chris’ cock and Chris does the shudder again and John thinks it’s the sight of that that takes him over the edge. Not the way Chris seizes up around him, not the gravelly, obscene noises coming out of the man, but just watching.

When John’s knees are steady enough, he pulls out. He doesn’t really want to, and Chris doesn’t want him to either, making protesting noises and hiking up to follow his cock, but his arms aren’t going to hold him up any longer and he really doesn’t want to break open Chris’ welts. At first he subsides to the side, but then, giving up, he just lowers himself to the floor and sits on his puddled trousers and leans his head against the table-leg.

A couple minutes later, Chris shuffles off the table and joins John, crawling over on shaky arms. He pauses for a second, then, seeing how John twitches one leg out of the way, grins and pushes all the way in to drop his chin on John’s shoulder. John snorts and moves his arm so he’s cupping Chris’ buttock and Chris rolls his shoulders back into a long, satisfied stretch that firmly seats himself on John’s palm.

“This mine, we need to figure out how to shut it down,” John says.

Chris nods and his hand absently folds over John’s knee. “Yeah.”

“You ever do something like that again and…and…and just don’t, would you?” John says.

For a second Chris is still, and it’s not the slack stillness of someone who’s just enjoying himself. “Yeah, well, we’re talking more now, right?” he finally says.

John moves his thumb in circles over the curve of Chris’ ass. “Looks like it.”

“All right,” Chris says. He shifts his head on John’s shoulder. “So what about the potat—”

“I hate potatoes,” John says. Then he sighs. “Okay, I don’t. But I am sick of that damn dish, and I don’t want to even see it, and just…there’s got to be something else you can cook, right? If you’re so great at it?”

“Sure,” Chris says, laughing into John’s shoulder. “Sure, I’ll come up with something.”

* * *

“Dad, honestly, what really happened?” filters Allison’s voice through the door. “You looked better _before_ he helped you bandage up.”

John glares at Jordan, who’s collapsed against the wall in silent hysterics. At least Jordan waited till the Argents had gone into the room, but every time he starts to look up at John, he starts laughing again and drops another couple inches down the wall.

“Do you want to do this in the morning?” John finally asks.

Shaking his head, Jordan scrabbles at the wall with one hand till he’s mostly standing again. He bats at John with his other hand, then presses it against his chest as he coughs roughly. “No. No, we should—I’m okay. I’m okay. Okay. Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t laugh in your commander’s face,” John sighs, just as a giggle threatens to spill out of Jordan’s mouth. He pauses, listening to himself, and then grimaces. “On second thought, never mind that, that just sounds—”

“Well, but you are,” Jordan says, suddenly sobering up. He thumps his chest one last time, then straightens up. “Listen, sir, you’re giving orders and people are following them, and that’s a lot more than I could guarantee if somebody fresh from the capital came in right now and ordered us all to retreat back with them. So you’re the commander.”

John presses his lips together, then runs his hand over the top of his head. “Thanks,” he finally says. “I mean, that’s good to hear.”

“I know it’s awkward if you look back on how it happened, but one, I don’t think anybody here really cares that much, and two, I don’t think anybody _not_ here is ever going to get around to asking,” Jordan goes on, earnest enough that John slowly realizes it’s coming out of fear. He thinks John’s going to back out of the job. “And even if they do, it’s going to be so far into the future, I’m sure we can come up with—”

“No, I’m—yeah, you’re right, I’m the commander and I’m taking the responsibility on, I’m not denying that,” John says. He glances past Jordan just to make sure nobody’s coming down the hall, then steps forward and claps the man on the shoulder. “It’s just honestly not what was planning on, or hoping either, so I just—I’m going to have to get used to it, that’s all.”

Jordan looks relieved. “Well, sir, I’m here to help. And I think that’s how most people feel. Even the cooks.”

“Well, they don’t have to worry about the damn potatoes anymore,” John mutters, rubbing at his eye. It’s starting to burn and at first he assumes he’s got something in it, but then a yawn tries to sneak up on him and he realizes it’s more like he’s been up nearly all night at this point. “I need to tackle them, I know they’ll have heard by now but somebody should tell them straight out what their choices are—”

“I can do that. That is, I’m offering to do that, sir, and if you want me to just draw up the next round of shifts and let you look it over tomorrow instead of us talking it out, I’m happy to do that too,” Jordan promptly says. “Also can get on clearing out the old commander’s things and freshening up the rooms for you.”

John looks Jordan over. “You can’t be this damn chirpy at this hour,” he says. “And what do you mean, freshen them up?”

“Well, I’m a morning person and it’s practically morning,” Jordan shrugs, and then he reaches over and taps the door. “And come on. Even if you don’t want those rooms, you need something bigger. Something that can fit in a double bed, at least.”

“You know what, if you’re going to offer, I’ll take you up on that,” John says after a moment. “Congratulations, Jordan, I’m officially promoting you to sergeant. Figure out what the hell Haigh didn’t do and bring a list to breakfast with you.”

“Yes, sir!” Jordan says, snapping off a salute.

As he goes off, John rolls his eyes and pushes in the door. Jordan might be happy now, but sergeant is a working rank and John’s got every intention of making the man live up to it. In fact, he’s just running down what to start Jordan off on when he realizes the person sitting on the bed isn’t Chris.

“Dad’s in there, borrowing my salve,” Allison says. She smiles sunnily up at John. “He’s still listening so I just wanted to say thank you for calling him out, I think he’s an idiot too when he tries to sacrifice himself like that, and I hope you keep calling him out on that or else you and I are going to talk. Well, I’m going to bed, so let me know when you’re all discussing how to clear out the mine!”

And she hops off the bed just as a flustered Chris bangs out of the other room. He’s so abrupt about it that he stumbles and grabs at the door to right himself, and as he’s doing that, Allison slips past him into her room. Chris half-twists after her, pauses as she calls back something about changing for bed, and then makes a face and backs out. He shuts the door, makes another face at it, and then turns to look at John.

“That went better than I figured,” John says, and then he has to make a face at himself. “Well, if I’d stopped to think about it, which I honestly haven’t really had the time to.”

“I’ll…if she…I think we’ll talk about it later,” Chris says. He looks slightly less red-faced, but when he crosses the room, he’s clearly still rattled. “I’ll talk to her. I’ll…”

“You do look kind of messed-up,” John says, glancing over Chris. He lifts one hand and flicks open the front of Chris’ shirt, and then runs his fingers along a faint pink splotch under Chris’ collarbone.

It’s not quite raw enough to count as a scrape, but Chris twitches and then snaps his hand around John’s wrist. He meets John’s eyes for a second, composed now. Then looks down at himself. “Yeah, I guess,” he says. “Didn’t think about that. Maybe we should put a blanket down next time.”

“Maybe we should just use a—fuck, I’m going to have to let Jordan move me,” John mutters, glancing at the bed. “Yeah, okay, this is too small now.”

When he looks up, Chris is grinning, and a lot closer. And still holding his wrist, though the other man quickly drops that in favor of untucking John’s shirt and sliding his hands up under it. “Think I should get a bunk with the other cooks?” he says. “Don’t want me to get any more roughed up, then—”

“Why don’t you just get on top?” John snorts, just before pulling him in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Archaeologists have actually found mummies buried in old salt mines. Salt preserves so well that the dye in the mummies' clothing was still bright.
> 
> I meant to put this in the last chapter's notes, but Thomas was named after the principal that Gerard and Victoria threatened into leaving town, while Haigh's the name of the deputy who tried to cash in on the supernatural kill list.


	9. Chapter 9

So John’s now leading the garrison, and they’re no longer following orders from the capital, which means that technically, they’re revolting. Or they would be if anybody even remembered they were out there, and that seems unlikely. Anyway, John figures he can finally turn all of his attention to the revenant problem, and then his son suddenly reappears.

With werewolves. Werewolves who know Chris and Allison enough to result in stilted yet deeply meaningful conversation, and at least two of whom are following Stiles around everywhere in a way that strongly reminds John of baby ducklings. Or would, if John wasn’t trying to avoid all farm metaphors now that his son is apparently a skilled wizard with the ability to make people out of sheep.

“ _Sheeple_ , Dad, sheeple,” Stiles corrects him in an exasperated tone. “Also, I told you, it was an _accident_.”

“And we are happy,” says his newly-peopled friend Scott, who apparently leads the sheep. He’s starting to look distressed; he’s got a pretty good command of human language for somebody who only began speaking a month ago but he’s a bit shakier when it comes to understanding human relationships. He seems to think any time somebody disagrees, it’s a major issue. “We like Stiles. We like being sheeple.”

“No, no, that’s…I’m not saying he should reverse it or anything, I’m just…okay, look, I wanted to talk about how to get to this mine,” John sighs, dropping his hand back to the map spread over the table. “Chris and Allison have been going over the maps we’ve got here, trying to match it up with the directions that their family has handed down…”

He glances over, only to find Allison and the older of the two werewolves trailing after Stiles, Peter, having a staring contest. Talia, the pack leader, seems more amused than threatened by it, but she also seems to be timing her smirks and sighs so they make Chris twitch, so John’s not particularly convinced.

“I think we have it narrowed down,” Chris says a beat late, pushing himself up in his seat. He flicks a glance towards John, who’s learned enough of the man’s expressions to take it as an apology for getting distracted. Then he leans over and circles his finger around a section of the neighboring pass. “But that still translates to a couple miles of mountainside to search.”

“And that’ll take forever if we have to go cave-by-cave. I mean, I tried when I was over there, but even with remote beacons and that sort of thing, it was taking too long for me to try and search them thoroughly, and I think some of them are connected so you’d have to find all the entrances and block them just to make sure,” Stiles jumps in. He tips his chair onto the back two legs, waving his hands in the air like he does when he’s calculating something, and then makes a face and lets the chair drop when he sees how John is looking at him. “So, um, rough estimate, I’d say at least a hundred caves.”

John grimaces. “Even with all of us, that would take too long. That guardhouse is three days from here—”

“We could cover it in two, if we went ahead,” Chris offers.

“Well, any werewolf in decent shape could do it in one,” Talia says. She smiles at Chris, who gives her a stiff, blank expression back.

“Sure, but correct me if I’m wrong, because it’s been a while since I worked with a werewolf, but I thought you can’t carry that much when you’re shifted, and Stiles was saying all the game’s gone,” John says dryly. “What were you planning to eat once you got there?”

Talia blinks. A chastened look briefly flashes over her face, but it doesn’t have time to settle in before Stiles jerks up and stabs an accusing finger at John.

“Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean, worked with a werewolf?” Stiles says. “What does—do you—did you—so you know werewolves?”

“I knew _a_ werewolf. It was back before you were born, he worked in the guard,” John says, resisting the urge to feel guilty, as his son clearly thinks he should. “Why does that—”

“And you never told me?” Stiles yelps, flailing his hands around. Off to the side, Peter and the other werewolf tagalong, Derek, look smug enough that John has a pretty good guess what’s bugging his kid. “Dad! But—but we had these werewolf books! I read them! I believed them! And they were all wrong!”

John also resists the urge to roll his eyes, because sure, his son’s making a scene, but damn it, it’s his son, and no matter how much Stiles drives him up the wall, John’s not going to let other people think John’s embarrassed by him. Even when John is. “I never looked through them myself, I just asked Lawrence—”

“Talbot?” Talia says, and when John nods, her brows rise slightly; she’s impressed.

“Anyway, that’s not going to be a problem now, is it?” John sighs. “Given the present company?”

“Well, I don’t know, given the present company, _are_ we going to be truthful and accurate about werewolves?” Peter mutters, while shooting a challenging look at Allison.

“My father and I haven’t concerned ourselves with werewolves for several years now,” Allison bites back, with just as much of a dare in her eyes. Chris tries to nudge her and she shakes him off, leaning forward over the table towards Peter. “But if you’re going to insist—”

“We’re not,” Chris says sharply. It’s Allison’s turn to nudge him, but he ignores her wounded look. When she frowns and slouches back, the muscle of his cheek tenses but he keeps on looking at Talia. And then, once Talia’s inclined her head in the slightest nod, he glances towards Derek. “We’re not in that anymore. We were out of it before we even heard.”

“Heard about what?” Stiles asks, at the same time that Derek suddenly gets up.

Talia and Peter don’t seem surprised, though they’re varying degrees of upset by it—Peter makes a half-hearted attempt to grab at Derek’s wrist, and looks just as wounded as Allison when Derek jerks his hand away. Stiles glances around in confusion, then starts to get up as Derek flushes and hunches his shoulders and generally looks as if he wishes he’d slid under the table instead.

“Um, so…yeah, I don’t think it’s a good idea to head out there without plenty of food,” Stiles says after a second, sitting back down but still watching Derek. He fidgets in place, groping his way through the change of subject, and then visibly sags in relief when Derek reluctantly drops back, muttering about just working out a cramp. “I mean, even for the sheep, it was pretty tough. There are so many revenants and they tear up the ground so it was hard to even get grazing near the end.”

Scott makes a weird noise while looking sympathetically at Stiles. It’s kind of a cross between a burble and a whistle, and when he leans over and starts rubbing his cheek against Stiles’ shoulder, John suddenly realizes the man’s trying to nicker with human vocal cords.

“Oh, um…um, thanks, but you’re _human_ right now,” Stiles hisses at Scott, quickly wrapping his arm around the other man and turning it into a brotherly hug. Then he looks up and gives everybody an overly broad smile.

“Finding the—” John starts to remind them.

Scott blushes and then abruptly drops off the stool. A second later, there’s a loud ‘baa!’ and Stiles, who’d dove after him, comes back up and tells everybody it’s all fine, Scott just feels more comfortable as a ram right now. And then stops in the middle of that, frowning at Peter, who’s promptly slipped around to steal Scott’s seat; Peter smiles at him and gives Stiles’ stool an encouraging pat, clearly trying to get him back on it, while on the other side Derek looks even more like he wishes he was under the table.

“Is he hungry or anything?” Allison asks. When Stiles looks over, she hesitates unusually long before going on, and when she finally does, she’s pointedly pretending she doesn’t see the odd look Chris is giving her. “Are sheeple like other shifters where they lose control when they’re stressed? I could go get him some hay.”

“Uh. Well, yeah, that’s a…factor,” Stiles mutters, swaying erratically, like something might be frantically nudging his legs. “One of them. But I just think—”

“The mine?” Jordan says loudly, and when everybody looks at him, he makes a dramatic gesture towards John.

“I realize we have a lot to talk about, but before we all break for the day, I just want to know whether we can work together,” John says. Then he realizes what he’d said and he has to bite the inside of his mouth to keep from grimacing. He’d _meant_ to say ‘how long’ they had to work together.

Stiles blinks hard, then narrows his eyes. “Well, I’m in,” he says just as loudly as Jordan, in that strident tone he uses whenever he’s telling off an authority figure before John can do it. “I said I was going back there and finishing what I started, and even if we have to go through every cave and it takes years, the sheeple and me are in. Right, Scott?”

“Baa!” drifts up from the floor.

“We’re Commander Stilinski’s household staff,” Allison says. She checks with her father, who just raises his brows, and that’s obviously a good reaction to Allison, since the smile she turns on John is faintly triumphant. “We’re going to support him in whatever he’s doing.”

Peter snorts at her, but he’s looking a little less hostile than before. He almost says something, then stops himself, looking first at Stiles—who hasn’t noticed, since he’s still staring at John—and then at Talia, who seems both surprised and bemused that Peter’s checking with her. She reaches around and puts her hand on Derek’s shoulder; Derek’s been waiting on Peter the whole time. Then she takes it off and draws herself up and looks John in the eye.

“Well, I do claim the lands that this cave is on, so you’d need my permission to cross into them anyway. I understand the capital thinks differently—” Talia starts.

Interestingly, Peter gives her a sharp look, though John’s not clear on whether that’s because he disagrees or because he simply doesn’t think she should be confronting John like this. Stiles disagrees too, but he’s apparently heard a variation on this since he just sighs and stoops to one side to rub at the sheep head poking up over the table’s edge. 

“I’m unofficially not paying attention to what they say,” John says. Talia arches her brow and he sighs and spreads his hands and wills her to just give him this one. “They ever get around to sending somebody to ask, I’ll tell them the same and make it official, but I don’t see the rush in letting them know. But the revenants on the other hand—”

“No, no, I agree with you there,” Talia says, smiling as Peter and Derek both huff in relief, with varying degrees of annoyance at her. “On both counts. Your son’s done quite a thorough job of educating us as to the revenant problem, and even if I didn’t owe him a few favors for Peter and Derek, I recognize how serious it is. And we’ll welcome any assistance in rooting them out—it’s just once they’re gone…”

“Well, look, I’m not a king, I don’t rule over the people who live around there,” John says. He holds her gaze for long enough to be sure she understands he’s not just speaking about any werewolves who are left. “The only goal I have is to make sure everybody’s as safe as we can make them. So can we agree on that for now?”

Talia considers it for a couple minutes in silence. Her family gets a little edgy, while Stiles has a whispered conversation with Scott and then sighs and just hefts the ram up in his arms, turning back and forth at the waist—he’s helping Scott see all of them, John suddenly realizes, and has to cough to hide the laugh. But Talia just looks as relaxed in thought as she does when she’s staring people down.

“Yes, we can,” she finally says. She glances at the map and then back at her family. “I also agree we need a plan quickly, but right now, perhaps we should each consult with our people about what we might bring to a cave search, then regroup. I think we’re tired—I am, at least—and we’re not really thinking best how to play to our respective strengths.”

“Well, that’s fair,” John says. “Plan to meet again tomorrow?”

“That would be fine with me,” Talia says.

When she gets up, she takes Peter and Derek with her, but John overhears Derek hissing to Stiles that they’ll be right back, while Peter mutters an apology for his sister’s officiousness. Stiles blinks at the first and just responds with a confused shrug at the second, telling them sure, he’ll meet them in the stables where the sheeple are bedding down.

“By the way, I got around and told everybody that the sheep are his and if even one scratch gets on them, we’re going to feed the person responsible to the werewolves,” Jordan casually tells John, looking on.

“And that’s going to make them feel what about werewolves?” John says.

Jordan thinks he did a good job, and he is clearly not going to let John dampen that opinion of himself. “Well, considering more than a couple of us have had werewolves marry into the family tree at some point, I think it might lead to some awkward family reunions, but those tend to be tricky anyway.”

John looks sharply at the other man. “This wouldn’t happen to be why you all disliked Rafael and Haigh and Thomas.”

“Besides them being assholes who treated us like we were lower than dirt, just because we’ve never been to this capital who probably doesn’t even remember we’re here?” Jordan snorts. And then he looks a little embarrassed. “Okay, if we’re being honest…a lot of us also figured you were probably…you had a little something. You’re just way too laidback about weird things.”

“A little something?” John says. 

He’s only half paying attention because he’s signaling Chris, who had been making for the hall, to stay back. Chris pauses and then looks at Allison; John leaves it up to him to make that call, and Chris ultimately waves at her to go. She frowns but does so, and then catches up with Stiles to ask after Scott, who appears to be burying his head in Stiles’ shoulder.

“Shifter seemed unlikely, but we were thinking witch blood, demonborn, maybe even satyr or dryad blood, seeing how you never minded getting sent out into the woods.” Jordan tilts his head. “I’m not really sure how sorcerous son with a gang of intelligent sheep shakes out the betting pool, but it does explain a lot.”

“I hear people talking shit about me,” Stiles says, marching back up the hallway without Allison, but with Scott still in his arms. At some point he’s gained another sheep, who trots at his heels and peers curiously up at Jordan when he stops. “ _Sheeple_ , Parrish. Don’t make me sic them on you. You know I could do it, I know all about those roasts your family does on the harvest moon.”

Scott baas in protest and Stiles immediately looks guilty for saying it. The other sheep, oddly, just keeps staring up at Jordan.

“Okay, okay, enough. They’re sheeple, and we have other things I want to talk about,” John says, glaring at Jordan till he swallows whatever smart comeback he had. “Jordan, can you go see that the Hales are all set in their rooms? Stiles, Chris, I’d like a talk, so let’s head back to my room.”

“All right, all right,” Jordan says. He takes a few steps back, bobbing out of Chris’ way, and then salutes Scott instead of John. “Till next time, sheeple.”

“You knew making him a sergeant was just going to make him into me but taller, right?” Stiles says. “Also, I’m cuter. Just saying.”

“Son, just.” John presses his hand over his face. “Room. Now.”

“Yes, sir,” Stiles says, and when John looks up, his kid is holding Scott to attention as well as himself.

Well, John’s got his son back, all right.

* * *

“I’m glad you took the chance to upgrade, Dad,” Stiles says, wandering into John’s current quarters. He spins slowly around, taking in everything, and then lets out an impressed whistle. “Not to mention found out what that asshole commander really was hoarding up here.”

He’s lost the second sheep, but Scott is still trailing after him, looking just as curious. Scott’s shifted human, but he moves like his clothes are draped over him, rather than being worn by him, and when he wants to investigate something, sometimes he seems to forget that his hands have fingers that spread apart—he pokes at things with them pulled tightly together, as if they were still hooves.

John really wanted to limit this to just his son, Chris, and at most, Allison, but before he can say anything, Chris pulls out seats for everyone including Scott. And doesn’t really meet John’s eyes when John tries to get his attention, and that’s on purpose, but…it’s probably Chris’ decision, no matter how much John would like to simplify away the obvious social undercurrents.

“Okay,” John sighs. “What happened with you and them?”

Stiles twists around, blinking hard, as if he thought they were going to talk about something completely different. Then he scrambles to take his seat, while Scott awkwardly drops into the chair next to him.

“It…was my sister, actually, and if I’d known I wouldn’t have—but it was still our family, I won’t deny that,” Chris says. He does look John in the eye now, but he’s got one hand wrapped over the other in his lap, and the top hand is white-knuckled. “What I was told after it happened was she seduced Derek and attempted to trick him into letting her kill the rest of his family.”

“Oh… _oh_ , you’re _that_ —” And then Stiles pauses, having gone from stunned recognition to anger to blank incredulity in the same second, and sometimes John wonders how his son does that without pulling any facial muscles. Stiles tilts his head. “Really? That was your sister? You’re not sure…she was adopted, or something like that?”

Chris clearly doesn’t know whether he needs to defend himself or not. “She was a full blood relation, and raised as an Argent. We used to specialize in werewolves,” he finally says, looking warily back and forth between Stiles and John. “I was the one who left the family, my wife and I did, a little after Allison’s birth.”

“Okay.” Stiles sits back on his hands and rocks against them, head bobbing slightly as he thinks that over. Then he draws a breath as if to comment, only to suddenly twist around towards John. “You two are doing it, right?”

“What?” John says, while Chris’ eyes widen and a flush comes and goes in his face.

“Dad. Um. Sure, he cooks for you and also, validates your alibis,” Stiles scoffs. “ _Also_ , I’m now friends with people with enhanced senses of smell.”

John makes a face at Stiles and is about to point out a few things about Stiles’ so-called _friends_ when he glimpses Chris’ face. Chris has gone rigid again, the way somebody does when bracing for bad news, and he’s clearly expecting John to deny it and John just…wishes his son would phrase things differently but he’s not that kind of person. “We’re sharing a bed, yeah,” he says to Stiles. “You?”

“Um, what, you mean…Peter and Derek?” Stiles says, going from knowing to slightly worried. He scratches at the side of his head, then straightens up when Scott—using exaggerated care—reaches out and bumps his shoulder with one hand. “Well, so…yeah, they…show up in my bed…from time to time. Okay, a lot of the time. Okay, so we haven’t really talked about it so I don’t want to slap a label on it and overcommit them without their say but they gave up eating all sheep meat and not only that, talked Talia into making it a pack rule and sure, they have lots of other choices around here but I feel like we should recognize the magnitude of the—”

“Son, I don’t actually need the details,” John sighs. “They’re good to you, right?”

Stiles looks a little offended that John even has to ask. “Dad, trust me, if anybody was going to complain about stuff like that, it’d be…um. Anyway, no, we’re cool. We’re good. If we weren’t, I’m pretty sure Scott here would do something.”

Scott nods earnestly.

“Good,” John says. He steps back and knocks into the stool Chris got out for him, which he hasn’t even used. He swallows a curse and rights it, and starts to tell the rest that they can go back out and then sees Chris, who’s stretched out to grab the stool himself, and that jogs his memory. And then he swallows another curse, silently telling himself he needs to not drop things like that, no matter how stretched thin he is. “All right, so Chris, that—that explains a lot. But—well, Talia was still talking to you—”

“Yeah, I know, I’m—sorry, I should have told you earlier,” Chris mutters. He presses his lips together and stares at his hands for a second, then looks up. “I’ll talk to her, but I think I can work out something. Talia prefers to be direct, so if she didn’t want anything to do with me, or want her pack to have anything to do with me, she would have let us all know by now.”

“I could try and talk to Derek too,” Stiles says. “I mean, I can’t…I’m not going to talk him into being nice to you, but I could find out what makes him uncomfortable. Like maybe you and Allison just promise not to be in the same room as him.”

Chris looks too startled by the offer to respond, so John does. “That’s a good thought, Stiles, but I’m not sure that helps. This is really between Chris and them, and while I have an interest in keeping it peaceful around here, I don’t want either of us to look like we’re pressing them just because of—of—”

“Personal stuff? No, I get it.” Stiles is a little reluctant about it, he always hates having to step back when he thinks he could do something, but he’s quicker to agree than usual. More importantly, John still believes he’s being sincere.

He hasn’t gotten a lot of time with Stiles since his son arrived with the Hales, but he can already tell Stiles has changed, and not just with who’s keeping him company at night. His son’s a little more thoughtful, a little more open to other people’s reactions. And for that matter, he’s much more open to having other people around; the Stiles who’d left had done it as much because he usually thought it was better to be on his own rather than have to accommodate someone else. But now Scott’s tagging along after him and he’s talking about giving Derek and Peter a say and asking if he can help out Chris.

“I think it’d be better for Talia and me to work it out with each other,” Chris says, bringing the conversation back to him. He attempts a smile at them, maybe to thank them, but it comes off more stiff and nervous than anything. “Look, honestly, Allison’s not—she’s going to—I’ll speak to her but this isn’t her either, it’s really my and Talia’s generation, as far as families like ours work.”

“Yeah, well, but Derek’s the whole center of this, right?” Stiles says. He’s a little sharp, and when that makes Chris wince, his brows rise. He didn’t think it’d be taken that seriously but he also doesn’t really regret it. That’s how John reads his expression, anyway. “Okay, look…okay. Just…I think I am going to just tell Derek and Peter you two are talking. I don’t think it’s fair that we all know and they don’t.”

“Yeah, sure,” Chris says, shrugging. Then he winces again and glances at John.

Who’s not clear on why, since it’s not like John really has any grounds to be forbidding anybody from talking about this even if he thought it was a good idea. Well, all right—John’s the garrison commander, he could make up something based on preventing any disputes while they’re all in the fort, but that’s the kind of head-in-the-sand nonsense that…kind of got the last commander killed. Kind of.

John…is going to stop thinking about that. “I don’t think I’ve got anybody else to tell. I guess just let us know how it goes. And if you need a private room for the talking, tell Jordan, he’ll keep everybody away from around there.”

Chris nods and gets up, and when John frowns, he gestures towards the door. “Better now than later, especially if we want to get a jump on planning for the cave,” he says, with a slight questioning lilt at the end.

That’s true enough and John steps out of the man’s way. Though he does briefly put his hand on Chris’ shoulder as Chris passes him, and Chris slows his step for it.

“Oh, hey, sorry, but could you walk Scott back to the rest of the flock while you’re at it?” Stiles suddenly asks. When Chris looks over, he pulls an apologetic face and then helps Scott move the stool aside so Scott can shift. Then bends over and picks up a stray shoe that didn’t shift with Scott; John’s not clear on all the details, but apparently, learning to shift the clothes along with you is a tricky skill to pick up. “Dad and I gotta go over one more thing, and I don’t want to make Scott late for feeding time.”

Chris and Scott look at each other. Then Scott clops up next to Chris. He pauses and looks up again, and then baas inquisitively. A bemused expression flicks over Chris’ face and he shrugs and continues out the door.

“Well, there, so long as Scott’s with him, nobody’s gonna attack him no matter how mad they get,” Stiles says, dusting his hands off on his hips, as soon as the door closes. Then he turns around, sees John’s expression, and rolls his eyes. “Dad, listen, I agree with you completely on not butting in and trying to force a resolution, but come _on_. I don’t want Derek and Peter to get blindsided, so I’m pretty sure you want Chris there to come back in one conveniently bed-sharable piece.”

“I did not miss how you describe things,” John says after a moment.

Stiles makes an outraged noise and John grins at him and walks across the room and then gets an arm around the kid, hugging him till he stops making that noise. A second later, Stiles sighs, and then he reaches around and pats at John’s back.

“I did not miss how you pretend like you don’t really feel it when you don’t get to have the good things and that’s not totally a huge deal,” Stiles mumbles. He gives John a last pat, then suddenly squirms free and runs over to the window. From the way he rushes there, John’s expecting him to fling open the shutters, but he just cracks them, whispers something, and then shuts them and turns back around. “Okay, there, that’s Derek and Peter taken care of, so let’s talk about—”

“They were eavesdropping?” John says.

“Dad, you apparently worked with a werewolf enough to keep around fake werewolf books for a laugh. _Of course_ they were,” Stiles snorts. He grabs a stool and plops himself back onto it, and then rests his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands. “So, real story. We’re alone now—I gotta do your room over properly, but I put on enough stuff I’m sure we’re eavesdrop-proof for this talk.”

John looks at his son, then at the window. Thinks about crossing over and just peeking out, and then pushes it aside and takes a stool himself. “So, you’re some kind of sorcerer now.”

“But I’m not a _bad_ one. I mean, I made sheeple. That’s not really the kind of thing you do if you’re interested in world domination, is it?” Stiles protests. He keeps it up for a couple more seconds and then crumples a little bit, his hands fidgeting around the edge of the stool they’re gripping. “Okay, so look, I was…was mad about what they did to you. It really wasn’t fair, Dad. All you were doing was trying to make sure people stopped getting hurt.”

“Yeah, I know,” John sighs as he sits next to Stiles. “Well, it’s water under the bridge now, but I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt. And—nobody else has, have they?”

Stiles blinks a few times, then starts in place. “What? No, no…not really. I mean, Dad, I’m not—I’m really not trying to hide anything here, I’m just…so to your question, no, not as far as I know. The sheeple like being sheeple, and Derek and Peter…maybe got a little more roughed up than necessary, even if they wanted to eat my sheep peeps—”

John opens his mouth.

“—but they didn’t know they were sheeple at that point, they just thought they were plain sheep and we got all of that straightened out anyway. Derek even uses Scott as a pillow when we’re on the road,” Stiles explains with a hasty but dismissive hand-wave. Then he settles back and his expression slowly shifts to surprised with a side of wariness. “I guess I’m just…is that going to be it? About me and magic?”

“What, did you want me to yell at you some for getting in over your head and playing with stuff that people warn again for good reasons?” John says. He snorts a little at Stiles’ dismayed expression, then leans over to put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Look, I probably won’t approve of everything you did while you were gone, but you came back in one piece and you’re still my kid. You screw up sometimes but I do think at the end of the day, you always do the right thing.”

Stiles looks suspicious for a moment longer, and then that suddenly melts away as he gives John a relieved smile. “Thanks, Dad. I…when I was out, I really—and I was kind of worried that when I came—anyway, I’m glad I’m back.”

“Good,” John says, smiling back.

“Yep,” Stiles says, just before his smile goes a little cocky. “So, speaking of, what did _you_ do? And listen, Dad, I am totally for you even without the details, and I’m gonna be for you after the details, but I just really, really, absolutely gotta have those details before I die. Really.”

“Before you die,” John says, lifting his brow. “Seems like that’s a while yet.”

Stiles isn’t having it. “ _Dad_ ,” he moans, twisting on his seat. “Don’t make me call in the flock. They will stare you down, they even bully Peter around. C’mon. It’s just you and me, I promise.”

“Yeah, no, you should…you should know.” John presses his lips together, then sighs. “And you’re going to be the only one who knows the whole story, too.”

“Really? Even with Chris—”

“Chris can come up with a good story without actually being around,” John says. He sounds more disapproving than he really is—than he should be, if he doesn’t want to be a hypocrite. “I’m not saying that he’s…anyway, he didn’t always see what happened.”

Stiles shrugs and leans forward. “And that was…?”

“Well…you remember the commander was obsessed with that one potato dish,” John says after a moment. When Stiles nods, John’s tempted to just leave it at that, and stick to the short, bare explanations Chris had offered for all the deaths in the chain of command, but—this is his son. And no matter what it makes Stiles think of him, John owes him the truth.

So John goes through all of it. He starts with the load of rotten potatoes and goes through Lahey’s death, then Haigh’s, and he includes the threats both made against the Argents. When he explains about his revenant encounter and the rumors that villages are trying to harness the revenants for themselves, Stiles interrupts with a few questions. But they’re uncharacteristically simple and Stiles doesn’t do his usual lengthy follow-up interrogation, and instead looks expectantly for the rest of John’s story.

“He did what?” Stiles says when John gets to Rafael. Then he rocks back on his seat. He starts to laugh, hastily stops himself and pulls an ashamed face, and then, upon looking more closely at John, he starts to snicker again. “Okay, I am the most knowledgeable one about the risks of mocking the dead in this garrison, probably, but…Dad, that was an earned death if I’ve ever heard of one. And besides, he was trying to whip Chris, seriously?”

“I don’t think that was because of Chris’ family so much as me,” John says, though he allows himself a brief smile because Rafael knifed himself and yeah, that’d been a pretty fitting end. “He said that, but I’m pretty sure he had some paranoid ideas about me plotting with revenants behind his back, and thinking Chris was wrapped up in that.”

Stiles is outright unrepentant now. “Funny how everyone was thinking you were working against them and you _weren’t_ but they just tricked themselves into having it all come back on them anyway. Man, Dad, if you can do that, you don’t even need magic.”

“I wasn’t trying,” John says.

“Dad.” Then Stiles pauses. When he starts again, he’s softer and a little worried. “Hey, Dad, I know you weren’t. I know you. Even when people are assholes to you and don’t remotely deserve it, you still try to do right by them. You’re a good guy. I mean, I’m your son, if anybody could tell whether you’re going full villain, it’d be me, and you’re definitely not.”

John stares at his son. Then he starts to smile, but halfway through his eyes sting a little and he ends up grimacing instead, trying to hide that. He puts his hand up and gives his face a quick rub, and then reaches out just as Stiles, looking concerned, hops off his stool.

“Hey,” John says, catching Stiles by the arm. Stiles stops and waits for him, still looking worried. “Hey…thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Dad,” Stiles says a little uncertainly. For all his newfound maturity, he’s still very much a young man, barely out of boyhood, with how he doesn’t quite believe his luck. Although…it’s only a second later when he grins and gives John’s shoulder a playful punch. “So I’m forgiven for the whole sheeple thing?”

“That’s between you and them,” John mutters, getting up. “That said, if you could not do that to pigs, me and the guards would appreciate it. Chris cures a nice slab bacon and I’d like to at least have a decent breakfast if I have to run things around here.”

“Sure, right, I bet he cures you a good, juicy strip every morning,” Stiles mutters back.

John looks at him. He blinks hard and wiggles the smirk off his face, hastily getting out of John’s way, and then yelps and smacks John when John gives his hair a rough tousle.

“No, son, you’re a grown man now, I think you can decide what and who you want to be responsible for,” John says, ushering Stiles out the door. “The sheeple and the werewolves are all yours.”

“ _Dad_ , it’s not like I can’t totally see what you’re doing there,” Stiles complains.

“Yeah, well, I’m running this place,” John says, smiling, and gives Stiles another tousle. “Now go make sure nobody’s eating anybody they’re not supposed to, would you? I have a garrison to run.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lawrence Talbot was the name of the original Lon Chaney, Jr. werewolf character. John's old werewolf colleague gave John the werewolf books as gag gifts, but John, being eminently practical, never bothered to read them when he could just directly ask a werewolf.
> 
> Derek will deny ever snuggling up to Scott, let alone being the living embodiment of the wolf shall lie down with the lamb stuff (but sheep are fluffy and when they're lying down, the perfect height for a head-rest).


	10. Chapter 10

John is committed to his job, and so even though Chris comes back in one piece—still trailing a polite ram escort who’s somehow managing to have a conversation with Allison—and says he and Talia worked something out, John takes it upon himself to locate the Hale alpha later on and confirm that. Which means that he walks in on his son sticking a hand down the front of Derek’s trousers, and then, when Stiles desperately tries to scuttle out of the room, ends up seeing a wolf he’s fairly sure is Peter slink halfway out a window before Stiles’ shirt, which is wrapped around his hindleg, catches him up.

“I am sorry,” Talia tells him, with genuine feeling behind it, over the barking and scrambling and banging shutter. “My family is not normally this embarrassing.”

“Neither is mine,” John mumbles into his hand, pinching the bridge of his nose. He waits till the noises stop and then peeks through his fingers, and only when he’s sure his son has departed does he take down his hand.

With the supplies the Hales brought in with them, John would’ve been more than happy to move his people around and put the pack up in the officers’ wing. The garrison force is so shrunken in size that there are more than enough rooms for them all. But Talia had requested something near the stables where their wagons would be kept, and upon seeing the stables themselves—which also have plenty of empty stalls—had announced she and her pack would be quite content with just a few modifications to those.

Said stables are just a hop and skip away from where Stiles’ sheeple are bedding down, but John doesn’t think the whole pack would settle for subpar lodgings just to make life easier for Derek and Peter. And he guesses he’s right, since the wolf ambling by with a sheep at its side, the wolf with a wineskin slung over its back, the sheep with a bag of what smells like fresh-baked sticky buns, isn’t either of them.

“Out, out,” Talia says, shooing the wolf and the sheep along. She narrows her eyes and curls her upper lip a little at the wolf, who’d slowed and looked over, and the pair move on with obvious reluctance. Talia sighs and shakes her head. “Can’t even blame the sheeple for leading my daughters astray either…you try and try to raise decent-minded children and they just…well, anyway, I assume you’re here to check I won’t have the Argents killed in the middle of the night?”

“Well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t,” John says. Then he takes a deep breath and tries to ease himself out of the hard stance he’d started to fall into. “I understand by your vendetta custom—and look, if it’d happened to me and Stiles, I’d—”

“Ah, so he did fill you in,” Talia interrupts. 

She considers John for a few seconds. She’s unusually tall for a woman in this area, but other than that she doesn’t immediately look menacing, with soft curves and delicate hands. What she does have, however, is an instant presence, even when she’s attempting to be friendly. Standing across from her gives John the feeling of standing across from a bonfire—warm, but if not watched, it could jump the firepit and lay waste to everything around it.

“By his customs, he has some reason to consider it a feud as well,” Talia eventually goes on. She’s interested but not surprised when John starts. “We dealt with his sister, and when the rest of his family came after us for it, we dealt with them too. But we’ve agreed to let things cancel out, as it were. My son is quite happy at the moment and I don’t see any reason to ruin that for him. I suspect Chris has similar considerations on his mind.”

John nods slowly. “Thanks. I just—I have a conflict of interest here, I know that, but I do my best to be as fair-minded as I can, so I wanted to make sure I heard you out, too.”

“I recognize that, and appreciate it very much,” Talia says. She pauses and looks John over again, and then offers him a warm but not particularly intimate smile. “Of course, I do have my own conflict as well. I have a claim to nearby lands, which is just as well-founded as any claim the capital might make to it, if not more so, seeing as I plan to be an active administrator. So I—”

“Look, like I said, if they start giving a damn about this side of the mountains again, I—well, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon,” John says. Then he sighs, because yeah, he’s got to think about it anyway. “But if they do…from where I’m standing, they’ll have to start from scratch. Right now, as far as I’m concerned, they’ve forfeited their claims, and we don’t have any responsibility except to look after ourselves.”

“Well, I see,” Talia says, in a surprised tone that’s also a little too pleased for John’s comfort. She smiles at John again, much more conspiratorially. “We should talk about this once the revenants are under control. Werewolves never officially agreed to the capital’s rule, and they never did tame us. I suspect you’ll be interested in the reasons why.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I would, but one thing at a time,” John says. “Revenants first?”

“Revenants first,” Talia agrees.

* * *

The second meeting to discuss how to find the cave goes a lot better, and credit to Stiles, it’s mostly because he apparently skipped sleeping in favor of interviewing everybody for everything they know about it. 

“Okay, so I took the area Chris marked off and cross-referenced it with all the old werewolf stories about the pass, and also, some of the soldiers had some old wives’ tales too, and—” Stiles pauses to yawn into his arm, while an assortment of haggard-looking werewolves nod off into the sheep patiently propping them up “—good news is, we can probably narrow it down more to a stretch that should only take a week or so to check out. Bad news is—”

“A week with how many people?” John says. “These things are hard to track, unless you—”

When he looks over at Talia, even she’s struggling to stay awake. She starts up, blinking rapidly, but Stiles is already jumping in. “Well, yeah, that’s a problem, they don’t even have a smell or a heartbeat, so the werewolves can’t really suss them out. And my alarm system was movement-based so if they’re not moving—”

“Like they would be if they’re encased in salt,” Jordan points out. Then he frowns and twists around, looking at something on the…a sheep’s just passing behind his chair. It doesn’t seem to be doing anything else, so John’s not entirely sure why Jordan looks so suspicious, but he makes a note to follow up on it with the other man.

“Yeah, so we kind of will have to take a bunch of people,” Stiles says. He’s obviously a little miffed to have some of his explanatory thunder stolen. “On the _other_ hand…don’t we have to anyway? I mean, when we find them, we’re going to immediately destroy them, right? And I don’t know about you, but I personally would want as much back-up as possible for that.”

Jordan shrugs and looks at John. “We’re close to skeleton staffing here already, but all the traffic is one-way and fair season’s almost over, so even that’ll stop in a week or two. I guess theoretically it’s a bad idea to leave the garrison unguarded, but given our choices…”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know, but say we need to get back here in a hurry. You want somebody not just to open the door, but to make sure everything’s still in working order,” John points out. A garrison isn’t like a house, where if you lock it up and go away for a week, probably you’ll only need to dust when you come back. Armor and weapons need to be cared for; walls need to be inspected and patched. “Also there’s still the problem of where the people who do go out will stay. We’ll have to take nearly all we need with us, we can’t scavenge.”

“We should time it to go out after the new moon anyway,” Peter pipes up, before looking at his sister. “There’s still game here, even if it’s not as thick as we’re used to. But we could build up enough supplies in a week.”

Talia looks a little less confident about that. “We’ll do our best, but I agree with John, ‘enough’ depends on the size of the group that goes out.”

“Okay, then…maybe we should plan on a smaller group so they can all fit in the guardhouse. And we can do supply runs up to them,” Stiles says, fiddling with the map. “It’ll make searching for the right cave take longer since we’ll have to just basically stumble around till we—”

“Stiles?” Scott says. Quietly, but he still has such an odd way of pronouncing things that he immediately attracts everyone’s attention. He flushes and his shoulders hunch in a way that makes John think the poor boy might drop back into a ram, but then Allison reaches over and gives him a pat on the shoulder. Scott glances over and smiles awkwardly, and then looks briefly as if he’s not sure why he did that.

“Yep?” Stiles says, also bumping Scott’s shoulder, from the other side. “Something we’re missing, buddy?”

“Stiles, we—us sheeple,” Scott says.

“We’s fine,” Allison whispers.

Stiles gives her an odd look, but the comment seems to reassure Scott more than the shoulder-patting and bumping. “We sheeple,” Scott begins again. “We…can find…the revenants.”

“Okay, I know, of course you guys are coming, I wouldn’t leave you behind,” Stiles starts, in the tone of somebody trying to cut off a longstanding argument. 

Scott looks frustrated, while one of his fellow sheep headbutts Stiles’ chair to cut off him off. While he’s batting her off, Scott clears his throat. “No, I mean—we will find them. We can—we can _find_ them. They—they’re in salt? We can find salt. We know how. People-wolves—”

“Werewolves, actually, but really?” Stiles says, looking fascinated. “I mean, I believe you, totally, it’s just Derek and Peter were saying even they can’t—”

“But we’re _sheeple_ ,” Scott insists, and somehow doing it without coming off as rude. “Werewolves don’t—eat salt. We eat salt. We find salt.”

“Well, we do eat it, but granted, it’s the people way if you’re civilized, and raw meat if you’re old-fashioned,” Peter says, also looking very interested. “But prey will zero in on salt licks miles and miles away. They _do_ know how to find it when we wouldn’t.”

And then he throws up his arms and falls off his suddenly-swaying chair, while two sheep standing right behind it look very pleased about his yelping. Derek sighs and gives Peter a hand up, muttering about agreeing to not call them prey. Peter mutters back about still being able to generalize and censorship and the two of them get into a side-argument that results in Talia rumbling irritably till they stop.

“Okay, then. Awesome,” Stiles says, eyeing Derek and Peter. He doesn’t look too pleased either, and waits till they turn embarrassed looks on him. Then he brightens up and throws his arm around a startled Scott. “Awesome! Problem solved! Man, if I’d known—”

“We would have told you,” Scott tells him earnestly. “But—”

One of the sheep who’d knocked Peter off his chair comes around and then shifts into a small blonde girl. “We tell you, you be eaten,” she says. Her pronunciation is much closer to normal than Scott’s, but she’s clearly got less of a handle on the grammar. “You too stupid then. Still kind of stupid, but people-wolves and your dad, you live now.”

Stiles makes a face at her. “Thanks, Erica. Real ringing endorsement of my skills.”

She makes a face right back. “You stupid, and Scott have no hands yet. You fall in cave, how he getting you out? He want to show you, we talk about it, we tell him, _stupid_.”

“Well, he’s got hands now,” Allison says.

She’s strangely defensive. Chris leans over and whispers to her and she sighs, but she’s still eyeing Erica. Granted, Erica is completely naked, and completely unself-conscious about it—which John tends to think isn’t only because she used to be a sheep and never learned human ideas like modesty, given how deliberately she avoids Laura Hale’s half-hearted attempt to toss a blanket at her. Erica just tosses her blonde curls and then drops back down as a sheep, trotting back to where she’d been…oh, she’d been the one plopped by Jordan.

“Right. So let’s move on from my theoretical, and really, honestly not grounded in reality, self-destructive impulses, and talk about our spiffy sheeple,” Stiles says, with a sidelong look at John. “So how fast do you think you can find the revenant cave?”

That’s to Scott, who pulls a thoughtful face. Then he slides off the stool and shifts into a ram—he’s getting better at remembering to shift all his clothes, too—and hurries to the back of the room, where he and the rest of the sheep huddle together.

“I think they need a couple minutes to talk it over,” Stiles says. “Anyway, in the meantime…so who’d go? Dad?”

“Yeah, and you, and don’t get excited, Stiles,” John says, even as Stiles starts grinning and bouncing on his stool. “You’re not the only one with revenant knowledge now.”

“He probably has more firsthand experience than Allison or me,” Chris suddenly volunteers.

Allison’s caught off-guard by it. She doesn’t seem to want to disagree with her father, but she does look a little wary that he spoke up. “We were tracking them before we got here,” she eventually goes on, when it’s clear that Chris isn’t planning to. “But we only killed two that we’re sure about. Those are the only two I’ve ever fought, and Dad—”

“Not for a good twenty years,” Chris says reluctantly. “Just once, when I was just starting out.”

“We had some problems with the villages closer to the pass,” Allison says to Stiles, who’d begun to ask a question. “Some of them, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re getting—they seem to be thinking that if you try and feed the revenants, that will keep them off.”

“I didn’t notice that, but I guess that’d explain why the villages started emptying out so quickly,” Stiles says, looking sober. “I didn’t really get a chance to check it out, I’d just—I’d hear when a skinner came by, that another village had shut up.”

Talia looks pretty grim herself. “I had hoped those rumors weren’t true,” she mutters. “What fools.”

“Well, anyway, between Dad and me and you, I think we can straighten that one out,” Stiles says. He’s doing his best to pep people back up, and Scott comes back and shifts human just in time to grab Stiles by the back of the shirt and keep him from flailing off the seat. “So…um, so that leaves Chris and Allison and Jordan to run the garrison?”

Jordan straightens up; Allison doesn’t look too pleased either, but at least she manages to not look as if she might break her stool protesting. “Hey, wai—I mean. Sir.” He ducks his head barely enough to qualify as a salute. “I’m not sure we discussed…did we discuss it? Shouldn’t we? Because it is truly, really truly an honor to be trusted like that, but in light of certain recent events, I—”

“We’ll discuss it. We’ll—I need to have some talks about that. Later.” John looks at Talia and wills her to not make a big deal out of the obvious lack of consensus in his chain of command. “I’ll get back to you on that. Anyway, I think Scott—”

“A couple days?” Scott says, a little doubtfully. He squares his shoulders but then holds up his hands with a bit of an embarrassed air. “We will go faster if…not all the sheeple have…”

“Oh. Yeah, so, they’re not mountain sheep, you know?” Stiles says, catching on. “So the whole spelunking thing. Hard on the hooves, and not all of them wanted to shift human yet, which kind of makes tying a knot tough. So I think we should do small teams, like one sheep, a werewolf, and maybe a couple guards? Anyway, we got a week before we leave, we can work all those tiny details out. But overall, I think we have a plan.”

* * *

“I think we’re planning on you not saving the day and then getting locked out, which is why you should send me. I’m expendable, nobody minds if I’m eaten by a revenant,” Jordan says earnestly.

Then he and John both pause. Jordan frowns and turns half-around, zeroing in on an overflowing basket of dirty linens. He puts his hand up as John starts to ask what’s going on, then leans over and stoops so that he can just snag the basket handle with his free hand. And then he whips it out of the way to reveal…a very puzzled-looking sheep.

“Baa?” the sheep says.

“You—you!” Jordan says, jabbing his finger at the sheep. “You—you look _exactly_ like the one who was under my bed this morning. Don’t give me that face, I know—”

Another sheep wanders out from behind the simmering vats of soapy water. “Baa,” it—she—John’s reasonably sure Scott is the only male—says, nodding her head at the first sheep.

“They do kind of look alike,” John says, as the pair of them trot off towards the stairs, as if nothing about any of that was remotely suspicious. “Stiles swears he can tell them apart, but he did have six months to learn how to do that.”

“Yeah, well, I swear, they’re…anyway, we’re getting off the point,” Jordan says, swerving back around. “And the point is, you can’t leave me behind. Come on. I know it’s important to have a competent rearguard and that’s why you should—”

John sighs. “Jordan, you’re going.”

“—remember that I’m way too hot-headed and young to be trusted if something…er, what?” Jordan says, blinking. “Oh. Okay. Well, then…who’s staying? You can’t just leave the cooks to watch over things. I know Chris has them terrified but that only goes so far.”

“Well, that was why I was figuring he’d stay,” John says.

Jordan considers that for a little bit. He folds his arms over his chest and frowns down at the floor, and then finally nods. “Makes sense. I guess the biggest risk is if somebody from the capital shows up and wants to know where the hell we all are, and why there’s an outsider in charge. But if that happens, he can just sneak out and he’s not supposed to be here in the first place, so it’s not like he’d be the one facing mutiny charges.”

“Just impersonation and fraud ones,” John mutters under his breath. Then he shakes himself, ignoring the way Jordan looks at him right then. He goes around the other man and pulls out the load of freshly-washed sheets they’d used as an excuse to come down, then plops it into the other man’s arms. “I want enough guards to stay back to be able to manage both the front and back gates. They’ll have to keep up wall patrols too—not expecting them to cover everything, but just to keep an eye out for travelers.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. Not everybody’s that eager to go.” Then Jordan grimaces. “That came out wrong. They’re committed, all right, no issues there. It’s just it…kind of is one thing to fight revenants with the fort to retreat to, and another to go marching off to the next pass.”

“Pick people who won’t give Chris a hard time, either,” John says. He grabs an armful himself and then starts walking them back towards the stairs. “If I need to talk to any of them first—”

“Yeah, I’ll let you know. I’m not just in this for the revenants—I really do want to do this job right. I’m taking the sergeant job seriously,” Jordan says. He’s earnest enough that John looks over again, thinking his face must have been inadvertently disapproving. But no, Jordan’s not doing it out of fear; he genuinely means it, to the point that he’s a little flushed with all that sincerity. “I’ll make sure you don’t regret making me one. Sir.”

John nods and then lets Jordan get ahead of him so the other man can elbow open the door and hold it for him. “Well, figure out who’s going and staying, and then come back and we’ll talk it over. But keep it quiet for now—I want this straightened out before we go back to Talia again.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know, I’m sorry about that. I’ll do better in the future,” Jordan promises.

They’ll have to, if John’s reading Talia right. She doesn’t strike him as somebody who’s necessarily an expansionist just for the sake of power, but on the other hand, she also doesn’t strike him as somebody who’ll miss potential cleaving lines, even in allies.

This whole situation’s just been one frantic, jury-rigged rush from one emergency to another, John thinks. And sure, he’s done well out of that so far, but that’s partly because he hasn’t had to go up against anybody with a decent organized force behind them. Now that he’s got a chance to get his house in order and prepare, he really needs to take it.

Well, got a chance once the revenants are under control. If John’s honest, he still sometimes thinks he’ll turn around and some other thing will pop up that he’ll have to deal with before he ever actually makes it out to take those on. What that could be, he doesn’t know—he’s being paranoid. “Not like I have any promotions left,” he mutters, pushing at the door to his new quarters.

“Here,” Chris says, appearing out of nowhere. And then saving all the sheets when a startled John drops them. He grunts and hefts them, wincing as one damp corner slaps his thigh, and then twists around to dangle the keys at John. “Did they run out of washline?”

“Huh?” John says, keys in hand. Then he makes a face at himself. “Oh. No, I just—I got distracted and forgot to stop off over there. I’ll—”

“No, I have it.” Allison swoops in and takes the sheets, cheerfully ignoring the way she’s surprised her father just as badly as he did John a second ago. Then she humps them up in her arms and smiles down at…for some reason ram-Scott was trailing behind Chris. “They’re on the way back to the stables so I can take Scott back at the same time and return the favor.”

John raises a brow at Chris, who keeps his face perfectly blank till Allison and Scott have gone off—Allison contently chatting while Scott throws in the occasional meaningful bleat—and he and John have gotten inside. Then Chris rubs his hand over his face and sighs.

“I think your son told Scott to follow me around as some kind of…way to keep any trouble from happening,” Chris says, giving John a sidelong glance as he looks up again. He stops and looks at John again, and then lets out an incredulous, but thankfully not offended, laugh. “Really?”

“I’ll talk to Stiles,” John mutters. He drops the keys on a shelf and then gives his shirt, now damp from the sheets, an absent stroke down the front. “I don’t think he meant for Scott to escort you everywhere, but still…”

“Yeah, he’s been busy running around storage, talking about what we should pack and generally making his case for quartermaster,” Chris says, still amused. He chuckles again, seeing John’s face, and then somehow manages to move himself to stand just a couple inches from John without seeming to put out any effort. He starts fluffing the wet spots on John’s shirt. “It was a nice thought.”

John looks at him. “What, Scott?”

“The Hales do seem to respect him an awful lot. And funny thing, I don’t think that’s just because of Stiles.” Chris’ hand tangles briefly in the front of John’s shirt, and when he’s getting it free, his fingers slip into the neck and brush at John’s skin. John takes hold of his wrist and traps it there, and he just closes the remaining space to settle against John. “Makes me kind of curious what they got up to on the way here, seeing as he’s a sheep.”

“He turns into a person now,” John points out. “I know they’re werewolves, but werewolves aren’t cannibals and…if I think too much about this, I’m going to get a headache, aren’t I?”

“Well, just seeing what usually gives you headaches, yeah,” Chris agrees. He doesn’t pull his hand out of John’s grip, but instead switches to his free one, pulling John’s shirt up out of John’s trousers. Then unbuckling John’s belt as John reaches around and starts tugging Chris’ trousers down, starting at the back and working them past Chris’ buttocks.

Chris does…some kind of hip-hitch, with that annoyingly young limberness of his, and suddenly John’s got a nice handful of ass. And a warm mouth on his own, and after some absentminded shuffling back and forth, some bare feet teasingly lapping over his toes as he stumbles back through the boots he’s just wormed out of, towards the nearest horizontal surface.

He pushes back, sucking on Chris’ tongue enough to distract the man and let John swing them around, so it’s Chris who ends up pushed up against the table edge. Chris puffs a hoarse grunt into John’s mouth, bending slightly backwards so his cock drags up the inside of John’s still-clothed thigh. Then he shivers and grips hard at John’s shoulder, and frots himself into John’s leg again, head dropping slightly so that his stubble scratches up across John’s own unshaven chin.

“Fuck,” Chris groans, his hand twisting up in the front of John’s shirt.

“I think you gotta be quartermaster,” John says.

That was…not how he was planning to do it, but if he didn’t get it out right then, he was going to have to end up doing it balls-deep in Chris and he just…he just thinks he shouldn’t screw up that with business. Which is why he’s screwing it up now instead.

Chris doesn’t exactly go stiff, but he’s no longer as pliant as just a second ago. He hangs off the hand he has on John’s shoulder, gasping a bit, and then his breathing steadies. He tilts his head back to look John in the eye. “Quartermaster?”

“Listen, you could make the greatest potatoes in the world but I can’t put a cook in charge of the garrison when I’m away,” John says. Then he winces. “Fuck. This is coming out wrong—I need to go and so does Jordan, he’s closer to the other guards than I’ve been, and I think at least one of you or Allison should go too, but I—well, even if I thought it was a good idea, I can’t ask Talia to let me borrow a family member—”

“I was assuming I’d stay,” Chris says, blinking. He pauses and shifts and his cock’s half-worked between John’s legs so that’s…that’s distracting, and Chris looks a little regretful, like he really wasn’t trying for that effect. Then he rolls his ass up to perch on the edge of the table, sighing and putting one hand to his back. “Honestly, thought I’d have to argue you into it.”

John cocks his head. “Do I have any other choice?”

“Well, no.” But then a little flicker of something uncertain goes across Chris’ face. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’d want to take that risk.”

“Risk? What—we’re actually _sleeping_ together now. My son got you a bodyguard,” John says. “Sure, it’s a little fluffy one, but it’s still a—anyway, honestly, do you think I _don’t_ trust you now?”

Chris looks as if he’s torn between being amused and being cynical. In the end, he settles for an expression that’s probably trying to be sensible and is coming out more wistful, with the way his hands keep sliding down John’s chest to John’s waist, and then jerking back up to John’s shoulders.

“You don’t really talk that much more,” Chris finally says.

“Well, look, I do all this—” And then John stops himself. Takes a couple deep breaths. Then sighs out the last one and leans forward to press his forehead against Chris’; Chris hesitates, then moves his hands around to the small of John’s back. “Okay. Yeah, I do, and would you like to be quartermaster and make sure things go all right while we’re out finding that cave?”

“Not really,” Chris says, and then he kisses John hard, cutting off John’s exclamation. Holds that tight for a second before dropping back. “But of course I’ll do it. Just bring yourself and Allison back in one piece.”

John can’t help smiling. “I wasn’t really planning on the alternative.”

“I wasn’t really planning on staying your cook,” Chris says, just tart enough to make John try and kiss him again. He ducks it and then sort of gives John a reprimanding bump on the cheekbone with his head. “Kind of like it more than I thought I would, I’ll admit. But you need a quartermaster. And no offense, but your son—”

“Oh, hell, Stiles doesn’t want it, he just likes telling everybody what to do. He can set up a sheepfold with that pair of werewolves and study up on his magic and be chief apothecary or engineer or something like that,” John says. Slipping his hands onto Chris’ thighs, running his thumbs up the insides as Chris lets out a low, wanting noise. “I love my kid, but you’ll do a better job.”

Chris breathes in sharply. His fingers tighten on John’s back and John raises his head and Chris ducks under it. Presses his lips to John’s neck, right over the pulse. Then starts moving down, mouthing over John’s collarbone, as he finally gets John’s trousers loosened enough for them to fall down John’s hips on their own.

“Yeah, I’ll do a good job,” he mutters. Then he swings his arm up around John’s neck, pulling himself up by that as John presses them together. “Okay, can we get to the bed so you can fuck me already?”

“What’s wrong with the table?” John says.

Chris sucks his breath again, but this time it’s in annoyance. “My back’s not as young as it used to be, you know.”

“I couldn’t actually tel—” John says, or starts to say, when Chris suddenly hauls himself forward and up, wrapping his legs around John’s waist.

Which proves John’s point, and it’s not like _John’s_ back is as young as it used to be for things like carrying a grown man around, and…they do eventually go to bed. Eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Herbivores will travel very long distances to find salt licks, and in some very peculiar situations, where salt licks weren't available, have somehow figured out that they should go temporarily carnivorous and get their salt intake that way. Carnivores like wolves typically don't have to be so creative because they get all the salt they need from the meat/blood they eat.
> 
> Scott the Heroic Sheeple makes sense of everything about Scott's character, I'm telling you.


	11. Chapter 11

One and a half weeks later, when the trading caravans stop running for the year, they head out of the garrison and over to the other pass.

John’s efforts to educate the surrounding villages seem to have temporarily halted the revenants’ advance, since the rumor about people feeding revenants has died down, and the line where the villages stop and the unpopulated part of the old pass road starts hasn’t moved too much since Stiles retreated down it with his flock, Derek and Peter.

On the other hand, the revenants are obviously getting more plentiful on the ground, seeing as nobody’s bothering to come back in the day and clean up what’s left after they’ve been through a village.

“Well, this was the one they were saying was threatening to feed people to them,” Jordan says, half-heartedly trying to cheer John up.

“I remember this knife,” Allison says, picking up something from the ground. She shows it to a frowning Scott and a standoffish but reluctantly interested Laura Hale. “This was the man who sprang Dad’s and my traps, and almost got us killed by the revenant who got loose.”

“I think this used to be somebody,” Stiles says from a few yards over, looking a little ill as he pokes at a darkish, sticky-looking patch on the ground. Beside him, Derek leans over, sniffs, and then nods. “I guess…the upside is I don’t think there’s enough left here to worry about it turning into a new revenant?”

John looks around at the guards he’s brought with him, assesses their expressions as disgusted tending towards alarmed, and orders them to start building a bonfire. Based on what he’s seen so far, he doubts that they’re going to need a fire that big, but they need something to settle them down and the werewolves, who look a little steadier about the potential for carnage, should be able to sweep the village for any survivors faster.

None turn up, though whatever happened, happened recently enough that they’re at least able to recover a fair amount of food and other useful items. The buildings also seem sound enough, with only one suffering noticeable damage, but…John suggests to Talia, and she agrees, that they push on and camp somewhere else for the night.

With the size of their group and the amount of supplies they’re taking with them, they won’t be able to make it to the guardhouse Stiles used for at least another day, and possibly two, depending on how much the wagons bog down. If they try to get as far forward as they can, they can probably cut down the next day’s travel distance, but then they’ll have to sleep out in the open. Since most of them are yet to take on a revenant themselves, John ends up settling for two more days of travel so he can use the remains of the next closest village for shelter.

The werewolves are surprisingly okay with that plan. Not that John was expecting them to prefer the outdoors simply because they’re werewolves—his old colleague had always been the first to head indoors in bad weather—but he’d figured they would want to keep going, seeing as Talia’s so insistent this is her pack’s territory.

“Derek and Peter clued them in,” Stiles explains, popping into the house John’s taken after dinner. “They got caught by a couple revenants right before we, um, before I…invited them over, let’s say, and were hurt pretty badly—well, Derek was, since he bit it before I could tell him why you shouldn’t do it, and Peter had to watch, and I think between the two of them, they’ve convinced the rest of the pack to not take these things too lightly.”

“That’s good to hear,” John says. The lone chair left in the place has uneven legs, so to stop himself from rocking constantly, he props his feet up on a bit of timber sticking out of the wall.

The door’s hanging off one hinge and he’s debating whether he should nail a temporary bar over it for the night, or just take it down entirely and wedge it horizontally across the doorway as more of a barricade against any revenants. Most people have turned in for the night, aside from the first watch, but through the doorway he can see Jordan talking to a somewhat-bemused Peter. John’s seen enough of how Peter follows Stiles around to believe that Peter isn’t going to _intentionally_ do anything to harm Stiles, but…he’s also seen enough of Peter lurking around to not be so sure about everybody else.

“Oh, he’s just interested in the fact that Jordan knows how to distill stuff,” Stiles says, catching onto where John’s looking. He makes a dismissive gesture with one hand and then leans up against the doorway. “He really isn’t going to secretly trick Jordan into giving up all the moonshine master knowledge and then murder him. That’s just Peter’s face.”

“You’re really not reassuring me,” John says, and then nods towards the miffed expression Peter’s making, which Peter then has to try to explain that to a puzzled Jordan. “Or him.”

“Well, I _told_ him if Talia wants to know what the guard’s up to, he should ask me to ask you, and not go poking around Parrish,” Stiles says. He shoots his own miffed expression at Peter, who hastily turns his face into an apologetic one. Stiles rolls his eyes and Peter abandons all efforts at pretending to keep up his talk with Jordan and just drops into wolf form and comes over to poke his muzzle at Stiles’ hip. “Oh, don’t you—listen, just because the sheep do it doesn’t mean you get to—I’m _not_ forgiving people based on how fuzzy and big-eyed they are!”

Peter whines and wags his tail in a suspiciously dog-like manner, and then, when Stiles sighs, plops his butt down and hopefully lifts his ears. Stiles makes a face but his hand still comes out and starts rubbing at Peter’s head.

“I am pretty sure that Talia and I agreed to table things till we found the cave, but generally speaking, we’re going to have a revenant problem for a while even after that’s taken care of,” John says, looking at Peter. He’ll admit, the werewolf does a nice line in limpid innocence. “Seems like maintaining some sort of co-working relationship’s in all of our interests. And it’d make it a hell of a lot easier when it comes time to decide where to spend the winter holidays.”

“ _Dad_ ,” Stiles says, blushing furiously, as if that isn’t another wolf-head peeking around the corner. “Okay, listen, I am all for strong parent-child communication channels but let’s just slow that one down—”

Derek—John does have an easier time telling the werewolves apart—slinks over and then swerves as Peter abruptly flops down where he’d been about to step. He snaps his teeth and Peter huffs and tosses his head, then rolls over, one foreleg curled invitingly in the air. Blinking, Derek looks around at everyone and then back at Peter, who snorts and pokes him with that lifted paw. So Derek irritably hunches down and Peter, tongue hanging out of a big grin, rolls into him, throwing the foreleg over Derek’s shoulders and then nuzzling at Derek’s ears till Derek’s distinctive scowl—which carries over faithfully from his human form—softens.

John looks at them. “Stiles.”

“Oh, okay, fine, I kind of was counting on at least a couple doggie beds by the fireplace,” Stiles says. He’s still narrowing his eyes at the two wolves, but his face says it’s a losing battle. “Though no promises that you won’t walk—”

“Kid, you are getting your own bedroom. Even if you hadn’t earned it by bringing in the Hales, you’d get one just for my own sanity,” John snorts. He ignores the way both werewolves prick up and then looks up at Jordan, who’s given into his curiosity and come over too. “We can find something near the stables, right?”

“Yeah. I think we should knock down some walls in the barracks anyway, with how many people we’ve got, it’s a problem that they’re all so far apart, but we should be able to do something to get you enough room for everybody,” Jordan says pleasantly enough. But then he gives Stiles kind of a shifty look. “And if I do that, the sheep are going to stop bugging me, right?”

Stiles blinks. “What?”

“They’re stalking me. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t know, you had Scott walking Chris everywhere,” Jordan says, his shiftiness turning into outright outrage. “Every time I turn around, there’s a sheep. When I’m running laps, when I’m doing inventory in the armory—I found one under my bed and another one in my _laundry_. And I thought we were friends.”

“I—well, yeah, we are and I…wasn’t mad at you that I can remember, unless you did something the sheep didn’t tell me about yet,” Stiles says, but he’s obviously groping for an explanation. He frowns and stops patting Peter. “Um. I’ll…I’ll look into that. I’ll…you know what, I gotta find Scott anyway, I’ll go ask right now.”

“I think he was over with Allison, last I saw them,” Jordan says.

Stiles is _not_ surprised about that. “Yeah, of course,” he mutters, just before shooting John a somewhat nervous look. “Well, I should talk to her too, so I’ll just…be right back.”

Jordan raises an eyebrow at John, who decides he’s going to ignore that one for now. John hasn’t missed the little signs between Scott and Allison but on the Scott side, he figures Stiles is better-equipped for figuring out…whether Scott actually understands what’s going on and if so, how that works for a sheeple. As for Allison, Chris seems to be taking the wait-and-see approach and it’s not really John’s place to second-guess him.

Anyway, John’s more immediately interested in the two werewolves who are just now getting to their feet, and instead of running off after his son, shifting human and sitting down with the apparent expectation that they’re going to talk. Well, at least with Peter—Derek looks like he’d rather run off but Peter’s got a firm grip on his shoulder.

“Could we have a word?” Peter says.

“Is it about my son?” John says.

Peter nods and then smiles pointedly at Jordan, who raises his brows right back. John resists the urge to drop his face into his hand and clears his throat, and when Jordan looks over, he jerks his head, signaling for the other man to leave.

“But I committed to dragging you out if things went south,” Jordan says, a little offended. “Doesn’t that get me a vested interest?”

“Well, yeah, but I think that’s in me, not him,” John says.

“But you’re not actually going to let me join in on warning Chris,” Jordan protests. “Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if you managed it so Stiles is always running off with his sheeple—”

John gives up and puts his face in his hand. “Parrish, did they finish clearing the brush back to the treeline?”

Jordan opens and closes his mouth a few times. Then he backs out of the doorway, but he’s got a mulish expression on his face that says John’s only going to get a few minutes with Peter and Derek before Stiles suddenly discovers he needs to come back over. “Yes, sir, I’ll go confirm that they finished doing the thing we can see from here without getting up. Right away, sir.”

“Great, thank you,” John mutters. He keeps his hand over his face till Jordan’s footsteps fade, and then he sighs and rolls back his shoulders and looks up.

“Rather insubordinate, isn’t he?” Peter offers, with a slightly sympathetic tone, in a very wink-nudge conspiratorial way.

John looks levelly at him. They haven’t had much chance to interact, and there’s been even less chance for John to see how Peter acts and what he’s capable of, although Talia seems to consult him as much as she does her eldest child and presumptive heir, Laura. She doesn’t seem the type to tolerate fools, and that combined with how much Stiles likes him says he’s intelligent. That said, he’s really still very young, and certainly doesn’t seem to have had the time to learn when he can be familiar and when he might want to just stick with being polite.

“You going to offer to bite Stiles?” John asks.

Peter’s face blanks out with shock. He looks even younger with his eyes rounded like that. Next to him, Derek straightens up so abruptly that he loses his balance and lurches forward. Then catches himself so Peter, grabbing at him, gets him on the way back up and almost knocks him off his feet again. Derek’s not really done anything except look as if he really would rather not be in public, so it’s a little bit of a surprise when he manages to speak before Peter does.

“We’re not alphas!” Derek hisses, as if John’s proposing something completely insane.

“Well, I didn’t mean you, I meant Talia—” John starts. Then stops because they look even more alarmed.

“Oh, no, no, no. No, we’re—I’m not sure how you got that impression but let me know who it was and I’ll make sure Talia and I speak to them and—no, of course not,” Peter jumps in, in the hurried tone of somebody desperately trying to correct a fatal error. “No, we—”

“We like him. We like him a lot, and we—” Derek looks urgently at Peter and then barrels on anyway, over what Peter’s trying to say “—we’re serious about him, and why would _we_ do that?”

“I think we might be talking about different things here,” John says after a moment. He’d like to look out and see whether Stiles is coming back yet, but he can’t do that without pushing towards Derek and Peter and they’re so agitated he’s afraid they might take it the wrong way. “Look, it’s been a while for me and maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought when werewolves want a long-term relationship with a non-werewolf, they offer—”

Peter’s calming down a little bit, though he still looks as if he’s regretting not waiting till, say, when he could have Talia do this. “Oh, yes, but that’s when the non-werewolf is joining the pack,” he says. He’s absently, and quite vigorously, patting at Derek’s shoulder. “Not when it’s the other way around.”

“Oh, you mean with the sheeple?” John says.

A little exasperated twitch goes through Derek. For all that Stiles claims Derek actually loves the sheeple, from what John’s seen, Derek tolerates them while they seem to think he’s very funny. “Well, they come with Stiles and we know that, but you’re the alpha,” he says.

“What Derek means is that we want to be respectful of the, ah, the parties’ relative positions, in terms of resources, and authority, and we do recognize you as the proper person to address,” Peter explains, with a lot of strained, hopeful smiling.

John starts to ask whether they’re _still_ talking about the wrong thing, because this is sounding a lot more like potential treaty negotiations and less like the kind of talk a father’s expected to have with his kid’s suitors, and then it clicks for him. He waits another moment, just to see if it will stop clicking, because it’s just…well, okay, to be honest it’s not too weird against everything that’s happened in the past few months. Actually, he probably should start getting used to this. Probably.

“Is this a lead-in into some kind of…courtship price?” John finally says.

“Well, I realize you have a number of discussions pending with my sister, but she agrees this one is better handled by Derek and myself, and we can put forward some very attractive offers without bringing the whole pack into it,” Peter promptly spouts, recovering his confidence as he gets back onto firmer ground.

Interestingly, Derek seems a little less eager to jump back into it. “Did you…think we were going to ask you for something?” he says warily.

“I. Okay. I…look, I don’t need—you don’t need to bring a dowry over or anything like that,” John says, shaking his head. “Stiles wouldn’t—he doesn’t think about that kind of thing, and we shouldn’t need it, and just don’t mess him up and I think you and I will be fine. All right?”

Derek nods and sags back, looking relieved. Peter’s a little bit slower, gesturing a little limply and then tilting his head. “You’re sure?” he says. “You don’t…want to negotiate for anything at all?”

“Well, do we need to? Is it not a real relationship in werewolf terms if you don’t give me something?” John asks. “Can you just give me a rabbit and we’ll call it even?”

Peter and Derek look at each other. Derek scuffs his foot forward and pokes at Peter’s ankle, and then makes meaningful motions with his shoulders and eyebrows, while Peter’s expression passes from annoyed to resigned and finally, to cautiously pleased.

“I think we can arrange something,” Peter says to John. “We’ll…regroup and then come back to you?”

John suppresses a sigh, because really, he’ll go through the motions of negotiating if it ends up getting Stiles what makes him happy and sometimes John just wonders if other fathers end up in these kinds of situations. Maybe he should ask Chris—actually, he really should, if only to make sure there’s not some odd hunter-guild custom he should be aware of. Though Chris had said they’d dropped most of his family’s traditions. So that should be okay. Maybe.

“Yeah, sure,” John finally says. “Let me know whenever you work it out.”

“Thank you,” Derek says, without the perpetual scowl. When he’s earnest like that…he’s younger than Peter so he’s probably younger than Stiles, but John makes a note to ask his son just _how_ young that is, since maybe John’s the one who should be giving Stiles a stern talk.

“Yes, thank you,” Peter says, just as earnestly. It’s awkward on him, but not in the insincere sense; he’s genuine about it, and obviously not used to acting that way with people he doesn’t know well. “And for the time being, I assure you, Derek and I, at least, are fully committed to eradicating the revenants, whoever we have to work with.”

Peter’s tone goes a little funny at the end, and then he winces and his head ticks towards Derek without him actually looking over. As for Derek, he looks as if he wishes Peter hadn’t said that, but then he pushes back his shoulders and raises his chin.

“Listen, I’m not going to make any trouble about Chris and Allison. I never met them before this and they weren’t—weren’t part of the Argents who came after us before,” Derek says. “But I’m not making any promises about other Argents.”

“Neither of us are,” Peter says, and then almost-smiles when Derek shoots him a startled look.

“Well, fine by me,” John says, standing up because he hears somebody coming over. “And for the record, I’m not expecting either of you to be friends with either of them. Just if you can all stick to whatever rules Chris and Talia laid down—and I do mean all, not just you two.”

“Okay,” Derek says, blinking. He and Peter both look surprised, though Peter immediately wipes it out of his face and just nods and starts tugging Derek back. “Okay, well, we’re…we’ll…”

“We’ll get back to you about the gift,” Peter says, just before pulling Derek fully out of the house.

As it turns out, it’s not Stiles coming back yet—it’s Jordan. “Sheep in my bedroll,” he says. “Not on. In. I think it thought I _might_ mistake it for a pillow.”

“You don’t take a pillow with you,” John points out.

Jordan looks a little wild. “I _know_. John, listen, we gotta—”

“Okay, okay, we’ll get to the bottom of it,” John sighs, as he puts his arm over the other man’s shoulders. “We will. But for now, let’s just get through the night.”

* * *

Even with the threat of revenants and without the security of the garrison walls, it feels surprisingly peaceful in the abandoned village. Probably the lack of noise—John can hear the tread of the people on watch and there are the low grunts and scuffles from the werewolves and sheeple—the sheeple still seem to prefer sleeping as sheep, outside, while about half the werewolves are shifted out and snuggling among them—that occasionally drift in through the doorway and windows. But to a man who’s used to the early-to-rise, late-to-bed racket of the kitchens, the quiet is downright unnerving.

John turns over on his bedroll and then starts, his head lifting, as his arm comes down farther than expected. Usually…usually there’s another body in the way. Even before he and Chris had begun _sleeping_ together, with that narrow bed John had just gotten used to crooking his body around, so now all the extra space is—weird.

He lies there for a few minutes, staring up at the ceiling, and then he sighs and figures he might as well take a shift at watch after all, and gets up.

* * *

They deal with a couple revenants that night, and one more in the early morning, just after setting out. The next night’s camp, the revenants are twice as thick, but they handle them well, too. It’s pretty brisk, no-nonsense work, and so far all the training John and Jordan worked on with the guards seems to be holding up. Not being able to actively help villagers had been incredibly frustrating, but the upside is that having to spend all that time explaining things has drilled exactly what to do into the guards’ heads.

“The werewolves are the ones who seem to be playing catch-up,” Jordan observes with no little surprise, once they’ve made it to the old guardhouse and start to set it up for renewed occupation. “Don’t get me wrong, they’re enthusiastic and it’s not like they’re doing it wrong, but it just looks…awkward.”

“Yeah, well, they’re used to just biting and ripping into things, and now they have to get used to range weapons,” Stiles says, coming up from where he’s been taking down his protective spells so people can get into the guardhouse. “They’ve got to totally rework their attack instincts, so cut them a little slack, Parrish.”

Jordan holds up his hands. “I wasn’t criticizing, just observing. You know, the way your sheeple are doing to me.”

At that Stiles winces so hard that John automatically checks who’s in hearing distance, since he knows whatever Stiles is about to say next, it’s going to be…they’ll be lucky if it’s just embarrassing. “Yeah,” Stiles says, looking at his feet and scratching at the back of his head. “So. About that. I asked and…I figured out why they’re doing that.”

Nearly a minute later, Jordan sighs. “And?”

Stiles’ head snaps up and he’s got that slightly crazed look he normally gets after spending all night reading things he probably shouldn’t be. “And so listen, keep in mind they’re only newly introduced to the human world and they’re _sheeple_ , not shifters, they didn’t start from a human base and go sheep, they’re sheep who are learning how to be human, and sheep things don’t necessarily translate to human things and—”

Jordan rolls his eyes. “Stilinski, I’ve got black dog in the family tree somewhere, so I know about animal instincts and all that—”

“—and they’re curious about men ‘cause remember Scott’s the only ram and Scott’s a sheeple so they were saying that they don’t know if he’s different from men-men and they _want_ to know and they’ve seen me but they pointed out I’m just one example and the werewolves keep turning into, well, wolves, so they can’t really see for long enough and they just really want to know another human male for comparison and you’re kind of accessible,” Stiles rattles off. Then his eyes bulge and he leans over and grabs his knees and wheezes.

“I’m what?” Jordan says a moment later.

“Accessible,” Stiles repeats. He winces. “I…told them to be nice to Dad, so they went with the next highest in the, ah, the ‘flock’ hierarchy—” he makes quotation marks with his fingers “—and that’s you.”

Jordan absorbs this. “Why isn’t it Chris?”

“Wait,” John says.

Both Stiles and Jordan ignore him. “Well, I think because they’re still trying to figure out how human mating works? I mean, sheep don’t normally go in pairs, right?” Stiles says. “Scott understands that part about people so far, believe me, he and I and Allison sat down and had a _long_ talk about what it means to learn human relationships and not rushing things and making sure you really understand what you’re learning first and, um, anyway, what’s relevant to here is the other sheeple are still kind of catching up there.”

“So…what, did they think when people have sex, it’s like a lamb and mom thing?” Jordan says. “That’s the way they do pair up, but that’d be really—”

“ _No_ , they’re not _dumb_ , you jerk, they know our stuff isn’t straight comparable with sheep stuff, and they’re actually doing the smart, reasonable thing and reserving judgment till they can understand things the way we see them,” Stiles says, smacking Jordan on the arm. “Unlike actual people, who are way too quick to jump to faulty analogies.”

John…really doesn’t need any part of this discussion, either with respect to participation or to learning anything from it. “Listen, can you just stop having them follow Jordan around?” he sighs. “I need him for other things. When we’re less busy, maybe we can ask for volunteers but—”

“Well, actually, if that was why, I guess I don’t mind that much,” Jordan says, stepping back and looking contemplatively at the nearest sheeple. “It’s a little weird but if they just want to have a look for comparative purposes, that’s okay.”

“I…would like to say thank you on their behalf, but I have this sneaking suspicion that I’d be unable to do that without grossly and undeservedly inflating your ego,” Stiles says, his eyes narrowing at Jordan.

“Excuse me,” John says, before the two of them can start up again. Then he points at the mountain range. “Can we just start searching for the cave? Is this going to help us with that in _any_ way?”

Jordan and Stiles shut their mouths, blink, and then look penitent. “Yeah, yeah, of course,” Stiles says, shuffling around in his cloak for a second. Then he pulls out and unfolds a map and a second piece of paper. “Okay. Well, so I have the stretch divided up into twelve sectors, and we have four teams so that’s three sectors per team. I did my best to make the sectors equal but till we stare getting into the caves, we don’t really know what we’re dealing with.”

“We’ll handle that as we go. This looks good, son,” John says, peering over Stiles’ shoulder. Stiles ducks his head, looking pleased, and John hides his own amusement as he gives Stiles a light pat on the back. “Well, let’s get inside and get a good night’s sleep and then get started on this first thing tomorrow morning.” 

“Should I start sleeping over with the sheep?” Jordan asks. When Stiles and John look over, he attempts to look nonchalant. “You know, just get that over with and let them satisfy their curiosity and all. I think it might help them keep their mind on the job.”

“Oh, for…I should’ve just let you wonder what was going on,” Stiles says, indignantly snapping shut the map. “I knew you were just going to take it—”

John puts his hand over his face. “Inside. Sleep. Now.”

* * *

The guardhouse is a little bit of a tight fit, even with the night patrol taking up posts outside since Stiles decided the salt lines he’d dug around the building had degraded too much to rely only on them, and in the morning they’re all relieved to get out and stretch their limbs and actually get to work. And then the teams assemble.

John and Talia and Scott—with Stiles helping him figure out when to be insistent—had done their best to put together groups who’d complement each other, but they’d had to account for certain non-negotiable rules. Derek might not want to press any kind of vendetta with the Argents, but he wasn’t going to go in any group that also had Allison. And according to Talia, who had a very carefully composed expression on her face at the time, while Peter wouldn’t _mind_ being placed with her, it just didn’t seem wise.

In fact, the only werewolf willing to accompany Allison is Talia herself, which meant John couldn’t put just anyone else in that group. Sure, he took Talia at her word that she wouldn’t pursue a fight either, but being captain of the palace guard had taught him that a fair gap still existed between not fighting and making peace. So since any group Stiles went into would inevitably pick up Derek and Peter, and Jordan wasn’t quite experienced enough to deal with a werewolf of Talia’s stature, that left…

“Scott.” Stiles shrugs. “He’d want to go with Allison anyway. He wouldn’t ever ask, but…look, do you really want to get looped in on that one right now, Dad?”

“Honestly, not really,” John sighs. “On the other hand, I want your friend to be okay, too.”

Stiles blinks, then laughs as if John wasn’t completely serious about that. “Dad, listen, Scott single-handedly took out revenants even before he got hands. We were on the way here and he charged one coming up behind Talia, and then sat down and chewed cud till we were done burning the body. I think he’ll be okay with her.”

“All right, well, then that puts you, Derek, Peter and Erica together with Marcus and Jacob,” John says, consulting his list. “Jordan’s going with the Hale sisters, Boyd, and…and…”

“I promise I won’t tell Lydia you forgot her name,” Stiles says. Then he frowns as if he can’t understand why him being dead sincere about that comes off as odd. “Anyway, yep, so that leaves you with David Hale and Heather, and then the rest stay back at the guardhouse. So that’s first rotation, anyway. Anything else?”

“Be careful,” John says.

Stiles starts to make a face and then looks again at John. He still looks a little exasperated, but his expression softens as he reaches over and gives John a half-hearted poke with his knuckles. “You too,” he says. “I mean, come on, Dad. I only just got home.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” John resists another second, then gives in and hugs his son. Ignores the squirming, and tops it off with a ruffle at Stiles’ hair before he goes off to his team.

Except for Peter and Talia, none of the Hales seem to be particularly talkative with outsiders. David is polite enough, but the moment he can, he shifts into a wolf and lopes up to just behind Heather, who’s one of the sheeple who hasn’t yet taken the step to gain the ability to shift human.

John figures that’s just as well, since the terrain is rough and he’s got to spend most of his time watching his step, and that’s even before they start descending into their allotted caves. Doing that and making sure that Heather doesn’t get too far ahead is just about all John has the attention for.

Heather almost immediately makes beelines through the caves, directing them towards the biggest salt deposits. Finding them and checking for encased revenants is easy enough, but the deposits are so plentiful that they don’t make a hell of a lot of progress before their shift is up. And by then all of them, even the werewolf, are so worn out with worming in and out of caves and tunnels that they really do need to be relieved, so John lays down a marker to show where they stopped, and then they head back to the guardhouse to rest up.

Everybody works hard, but it’s basically the same for them, too. For the first two days, shifts go out and in, but with nothing to show for it but an awful lot of rock salt.

And then, on the third day, Scott finds a sinkhole.

Well, to be accurate, he finds a flooded sinkhole and sets up beside it and won’t budge, so Allison starts clearing out a campsite near it and Talia sends up a summoning howl to bring the rest of them over. The other sheep immediately congregate around the opening, acting edgy and headbutting at anybody who wants to look down into it till Stiles gets there.

“That’s the cave,” Stiles announces after conferring with Scott. “I mean, down under the water.”

Jordan looks dubiously at the opening. It’s only a few yards wide and from farther off, looks like a harmless spring, but when you get close, the water’s so dark that you can’t make out the bottom. The effect’s made even more menacing by the dissolved salt in the water, which washes up the sides of the sinkhole and leaves them crusted with dirty white rings.

“But shouldn’t the brine keep them from moving around, too?” Jordan asks. “Don’t tell me they’re crawling out of that place.”

“No, but some idiot crawled in at some point,” Peter says. He’s standing a few feet from the sinkhole, frowning at something on the rock slabs that surround the sinkhole. 

Talia goes over and the two of them exchange gestures till a curious Stiles joins them, dropping down and tugging at something embedded in the rock. Stiles grunts and braces himself against his foot, and then whatever it is comes free, sending him flying backwards. Peter lunges and grabs him by the arm just as Derek, pivoting from the other direction, shoves the nearest sheep behind him as some kind of makeshift barrier to keep John’s son from falling dangerously near the sinkhole edge.

“Pulley,” Stiles announces, oblivious to his rescuer werewolves. He’s slightly more attentive to the annoyed sheep—Lydia? John’s starting to see some slight differences in how they ‘maa’ at people—and gives her a pat as he stands up, holding out the rusty metal bit. “Okay. So somebody went spelunking in there, maybe salt-mining or something?”

“I think the sinkhole’s natural,” Allison says, looking back at the opening. Scott’s shifted human and is hovering at her elbow, looking anxious, but he’s letting her go right up to the edge. “Probably the water leached down and ate the salt away till the top fell in. But the water level varies a lot, you can tell by how wide the salt crusts are spread out. I bet the cave drains out in the fall when the streams start freezing up.”

“But those are werewolf signs,” Derek mutters, talking to his mother and pointing at the spot she and Peter had been examining. “Since when do we check out salt caves?”

Talia frowns and scuffs her foot over something, and when John finally goes over, he can just make out some worn-down scratches under the lichen and moss overgrowth she’s scrubbing away. The symbols don’t include spirals or any of the commonly-known werewolf signs, but John remembers enough of what his old colleague had taught him to recognize that some are werewolf pack brands, even if he can’t recognize which packs they belong to.

“I suppose for any number of reasons at first,” she eventually says. “Perhaps some prey fell in and they wanted to recover the meat. The deer and so forth would come for the salt, of course, so I imagine this was a popular stalking ground for the omegas who used to roam here.”

Peter’s taken the pulley bit from Stiles and has squatted down to use it to pick at the hole from which Stiles had pulled it out. “Or they went in thinking they’d find an advantage or two,” he muses. “If that hole dries up from time to time, and they went down and were mauled, but not so badly they couldn’t get back before they died, and then of course they’d turn into revenants up here…hmm. Broken claws here.”

He pulls one out of the ground and then hands it over to an immediately-interested Talia. She flips it around and is starting to pick out the dirt from the broad end when John clears his throat.

“Listen, I guess it’s…it’d be useful to know exactly what happened with the first one, but for now, as far as stopping them goes—we’re sure this is the right cave?” he says.

“Yes,” Scott says. Then he makes an awkward gesture that involves pointing to his tongue and looking uncertainly at Stiles.

“Um, yeah, the sheeple are sure,” Stiles says. “Revenants have this weird…um, taste to them, and even with all that water it’s coming through. So there are definitely revenant bodies steeping in there. But I don’t know how we’re supposed to get them out—I don’t think we want to dive in there, even if the saltwater will stop them from moving…”

“But this thing dries out once in a while,” Jordan says, looking from Allison to Stiles and then to John. “Right? So it’s got to have drainage somewhere. We could just find the holes, make it bigger, and then send down a team.”

It’s not a bad idea, but the garrison force is too depleted to even have a full-time engineer anymore, and while John’s seen a lot of creative jerry-rigging from the guards, for a project of that size, you really want a bit more expertise than that. “Still going to take a while to set all of that up properly,” he notes. “In the meantime, somebody’s going to have to sit here and make sure nobody else falls in.”

“Well, I can set up some beacons and things like that so they’re not _literally_ sitting here,” Stiles says contemplatively. “The guardhouse is getting spiffed up again and now that we know where to go, it’s not a bad hike from there.”

“I imagine we’ll need a while simply to comb through the mountainsides and find all of the existing revenants as well,” Talia says. Her tone’s a little dry and when John looks at her, she offers him a smile that’s about as conciliatory as it is challenging. She’s going to keep it friendly but she’s not going to roll over and show her belly, is how John reads it. “This is a good central supply location for that too, for both of us. Particularly as you’ll maintain an interest in alternatives to your pass across the range, I expect.”

John sees Stiles frown out of the corner of his eye, while Peter’s looking a little wary of his sister. But when Stiles gets up—Scott and Allison both step towards him—John holds up his hand. Stiles hesitates, then reluctantly stands back.

“That sounds an awful lot like a treaty,” John says to Talia.

“Or a trade deal. Or an alliance for mutual protection. I suppose it all depends on your perspective,” Talia says, still smiling. “I do understand you’re a little bit reluctant to stand on your authority, but—”

“Yeah, well—look, if I’m close enough to that for you.” Then John pauses and lets her take it from there. Her eyes narrow a little but mostly he thinks she’s amused. And a little respectful, when she finally nods at him. “Then I guess you and I might as well do it. No point in waiting till something else happens.”

“Indeed,” Talia says. “At the rate I hear you’ve been going, I’ll likely be talking to the cook next time.” 

John opens his mouth. Then shuts it. Then he just tries not to look too much like he has a headache, even if he’s starting to. Because, well, she’s kind of got a point, and every time so far that John’s stopped to consider that kind of point, something’s happened to him and he’d just rather not end up accidentally leading a reverse coup against the capital. He’s finally gotten to a place where he thinks he can both do what he thinks needs to be done, without sneaking around people’s backs, and can be content with it. So he’d rather not tempt fate again.

“So, why don’t we talk about those sweeps?” he suggests, ignoring how Talia smirks at him.

* * *

“She should be fair,” Chris says, several days after, when they’ve returned to the garrison to find it not only peaceful but scrupulously clean, with several major repairs to the plumbing underway. “Talia’s an alpha, they’re always going to test how far they can push you, but she’s not known for the kind of posturing for the sake of posturing that other alphas are.”

“Sure, but still, makes me glad that Stiles is interested in taking up the guardhouse post again,” John mutters, sitting down to the evening meal. He lets Chris serve him two of the three steaming, delicious-smelling dishes on the table and then rolls his eyes and catches Chris’ arm and holds onto it till Chris abandons the silly serving spoon and just sits down with him. “Call me a bad parent for putting my son out there, but he seems to handle the werewolves better, and when he can’t, his sheeple can scare them. I’m okay just going out to visit with the weekly supply run.”

Chris laughs and picks up his silverware, but manages to do it slowly enough that John still ends up taking the first bite. Which is so good that John half-forgets about being annoyed with Chris and just chews and tastes and…realizes he’s moaning a little right when Chris hides a chuckle with his mug.

“This isn’t potato,” John mumbles through his mouthful.

“It is potato,” Chris says, taking another swig that does nothing to hide his smirk. “I know you said you were sick of them, but we still have too many. But it’s not that recipe, anyway, and you seem like you like them.”

“Yeah.” John stuffs more into his mouth and this time, manages to not moan. Barely. “Yeah. They’re good. They’re…”

“Shoestring fries,” Chris says. He watches John eat, the smugness slowly melting into a less self-interested kind of satisfaction. “The trick is cook them twice and use duck fat.”

John’s still eating the fries, but a tiny, stubborn piece of his mind is still trying to listen to Chris, because the rest of his mind is so distracted because of the man and what he’s done while John was out with the rest at the revenant cave and all of that was great and John really does appreciate it. And appreciate Chris. And damn, but these potato shoestring things are good. “Duck fat? Where did you get ducks? Did you send down a hunting party while we were gone? They don’t usually fly this high up the mountain.”

And suddenly Chris is frowning. “You didn’t send it?” he says.

“The duck fat?” John says, which pretty much answers Chris, from the expression on the other man’s face. “Well, no…not that I know of, but why…”

“When they were unpacking the new supplies for the larder, Jordan handed me a jar of duck fat and said it was for you,” Chris says, still frowning. “ _For_ you, not from you…and he was in one of the Hale wagons at the time, come to think of it…”

John goes still. Then he picks up a fry and looks at it. “Chris, you used to know about werewolves, right?”

“Well, I still do, I just don’t really use it,” Chris says, looking a little wary. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m rusty and anyway, Talbot never got into his pack much so…anyway, say that duck fat’s actually from Derek and Peter, and they got it to you via Jordan because they figured you’d cook something for me with it,” John says. He holds onto the fry for another second, then puts it down when he realizes he’s moving towards his mouth in spite of himself. Then he picks it back up again, because damn it, but they are just too tasty to leave. “And they did that because of how they’re interested in Stiles, and I didn’t just marry my kid to them, did I?”

“Oh.” Chris momentarily looks relieved, and then he settles back and starts eating. “No, they don’t work like that. If they were gifting to you, Stiles still gets a say and all, they’re just…hoping you’ll be nice about things.”

John lets out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and then…nibbles the fry. “Okay. Good. That’s fine. That’s…well, guess this is better than the rabbit I suggested, anyway.”

“Glad to hear it,” Chris says, looking up. “Wasn’t sure the recipe would work out, it’s been handed down in the family but I never bothered trying till now.”

And sure, he looks pleased…and pleased, and maybe he and John don’t chat the way that some people go on, but John’s getting pretty decent about reading the man now and there’s just something extra in how satisfied Chris looks. Something that makes John put the fry down again. “So what’s it mean that you’re digging up every recipe in the family cookbook for me?”

Chris looks up again and his expression is far too bland. “We don’t have a cookbook,” he says after a second. “It’s all memorized. Lot more portable that way.”

“That’s not what I mean,” John says, poking at his food. Then he pushes back some from the table, hard enough to make Chris start a bit. “Look, I like it—I like the food, and even if I don’t need the—the service, I—I appreciate the effort, but it’s just—I thought you said you didn’t think you’d be staying my cook.”

“I said I wasn’t _planning_ on it, but I don’t mind it, turns out,” Chris says, shrugging. He puts down his knife and fork. “And I’m good at it, aren’t I?”

“Did you think I was going to fire you?” John says.

A flicker of exasperation goes through Chris’ face. Then another flicker, a slower-burning but ultimately hotter one, as John hooks one foot around the leg of Chris’ chair and jerks that around so when they stand up, John can just step forward and walk right up against Chris.

“No, but I wasn’t sure if you were thinking I had better things to do, when like I said, I like it and I don’t mind it,” Chris says, in between kisses. His hands find their way to John’s hips, and then one slides further around to clutch in the back of John’s shirt as they start running into the table, rattling plates and mugs. “And if you’re not going to _say_ , guess I have to and hell if anybody _else_ is going to do it for you, not if you’re going to make me your _back-up_ and—”

“Oh,” John mutters around Chris’ lower lip, which he’s sucking. “Yeah. All right, sounds fine to me.”

Chris hits him once on the shoulder. And complains about the wasted food a couple hours later, when they make it back from the bedroom and find the plates still sitting there, grease congealed into unappealing whitish streaks across the remaining portions. John reminds him that they’ve still got plenty of potatoes to work through and Chris hits him again and…

Anyway. John’s a shit cook but he is a _great_ eater. So it works out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scott and Allison are meant to be, but I want to be realistic for a second and think about the fact that Scott's going to need a while to adjust to everyday human life, let alone be equipped for human romantic relationships, and if Allison truly likes him, she'll slowboat it and wait for him. Otherwise there are squicky consent issues I do not want in my lovely sheeple daydreams (I have gotten kind of protective of them, even though they're one, fictional, and two, more than capable of handling themselves).
> 
> Well, with Scott, anyway. I think the female sheeple are educating themselves just fine.
> 
> Boyd's a guard, not a sheeple.
> 
> When you talk about salt-mining, you're not necessarily talking about chiseling out solid salt. Just as valuable, and sometimes cheaper for manufacturing purposes, are the brine springs that well up in those areas.
> 
> So this is the end of the story, yes, but I imagine the Hales set up a new house in the area and they and the Stilinskis jointly administer to the area, regularly running revenant hunts in wolf-sheeple-guard trios, and the capital is too busy to bother them for a good long while. And improbably good things continue to happen to John, while the sheeple terrorize Derek and Peter into being good little wolves for Stiles.


End file.
